Q Toon: Pumphandle Hold

You may remember Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan as the guy schooled by Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for accusing him of threatening to subpoena phone calls.

The Freedom Caucus Republican is also in the running to replace Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House, but is now dogged by accusations that while he was Assistant Coach of the wrestling team at The Ohio State University, he ignored and even laughed at multiple reports of the team doctor's sexually inappropriate examinations of team members.

That's in addition to a problem the department apparently had with staff and students who would ogle team members as they showered. The situation was serious enough to prompt the head of the athletic department to move the wrestlers' locker room to another building.

John Aravosis counts nine accusers who have come forward publicly so far, but with a possible 1,500 victims in The Ohio State wrestling and other team sports, OSU's liability could potentially dwarf the $500 million settlement reach in Michigan State's Larry Nassar case.

Jordan has denied any knowledge of the complaints, and called at least two of the men liars. He's even said that the scandal is the invention of Rod Rosenstein and the Deep State.

 “They know what they’re saying is not accurate,” he told [Fox News's Bret] Baier. “I know they know what they’re saying is not true. I know they know that. And they’re saying it anyway.”
... “What is driving these guys to say this now?” Baier asked. “The timing is suspect,” Jordan replied, citing his recent interrogation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server and possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Jordan added that the law firm in charge of OSU’s sexual abuse investigation, Perkins Coie, was “Hillary Clinton’s law firm,” the same firm that found “an ex-British spy to put together a dossier to go after President Trump.”

In April, The University began an investigation of the doctor, who committed suicide in 2005. Spokespersons for the University are not commenting on the accusations while the investigation is underway.

Some of Jordan's current colleagues are not so circumspect.

“This is the same Jim Jordan who as a Congressman has self-righteously demanded investigations of anything and everything under the sun,” [New York Democrat Sean] Maloney tweeted Saturday. “Well, times’s up, Jim. We need to hear these victims and investigate Jim Jordan now.”

School for Sex Scandal

I've been over the river and through the woods with family over the Thanksgiving holiday, so I may have missed whatever new accusations of sexual harassment or under age dating or indecent exposure have come out against whatever beloved, respected, or powerful politician, entertainer or sports figure came out Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. It's not as though I've been incommunicado with the world, but given the vast range of political opinions around our dinner table, some subjects just had to be ignored for a while.

But now that we're all back home with our Thanksgiving leftovers, Sexcapadeback Saturday reheats cartoons of selected sexual scandals that I've had the occasion to draw about. This mess didn't start with Harvey Weinstein, and it probably won't end with Charlie Rose. It goes way back, and there has often been one Usual Suspect in particular.

Because of the accusations against Alabama Inquisitor Judge Roy Moore, conservatives want to re-litigate the sexual dalliances of President Bill Clinton. His peccadilloes fall in that gray area between consensual affairs and clear and obvious sexual harassment; Monica Lewinsky was no 14-year-old, but she was a subordinate employee, and the episode displayed, more than any of Clinton's other affairs, a profound lapse of judgement on the President's part.

But if we are to re-litigate the Clinton imbroglio, it's only fair to file an amicus curiae brief about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, too. After all, unlike Bill Clinton, Justice Thomas is still regularly collecting a government paycheck.

Sexual harassment scandals are the exclusive province of no political party. But the Edwin Edwards test often determines the degree of damage to the accused: the Louisiana Democrat once boasted, "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy."

In 2006, Republican Congressman Mark Foley lost his reelection bid in Florida over revelations that he propositioned male pages who worked in his office.

Four years later, it was Democrat Eric Massa of New York who was compelled to resign as the House Ethics Committee investigated reports that he habitually groped male members of his staff. He admitted on Glenn Beck's Fox News program that "not only did I grope [a staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," but then he denied on Larry King's CNN program ever having groped anyone.

The revelations that House Speaker Dennis Hastert had molested student athletes when he was a high school wrestling coach in Illinois came out only after he had left office. The statute of limitations had run out on those incidents; he was convicted of violating banking rules when he paid hush money to the now adult victims of his predatory behavior.

Sexual harassment typically involves an imbalance of power: adult vs. adolescent or child; employer vs. employee; faculty vs. student; celebrity vs. average citizen. Or the strong arm of the law vs. the legally vulnerable:

Many of these cartoons have involved male-on-male misdeeds because I draw cartoons for the LGBTQ press, so unless the perpetrator has a history of telling us how immoral we are, it's extremely rare that I turn my pen to heterosexual hanky-panky. In part it's also because for so long, male-to-female sexual harassment was passed off as relatively normative — even funny. (You can draw a straight line from Pepe LePew to Al Franken.)

When it comes to sexual relationships between adults and children, however, we have always reacted with more seriousness, whether we're talking about girls or boys. (Gauzy recollections of heterosexual boys coming of age in The Graduate and The Summer of '42 notwithstanding.) Prior to the Roy Moore accusations, the right-wing media played up man-on-boy pedophilia scandals because it was so easy to extrapolate sexual misbehavior victimizing under-age males with consensual and healthy relationships between adult gay men.

The LGBTQ community constantly needs to remind Republican Puritans that one thing is not always like another thing. Again and again.

Q Toon: Keeping the Kids Safe

It should be noted that the state legislator in this week's cartoon is begin facetious from Frame One. The statute of limitations on Former Speaker Hastert's alleged sexual assaults expired decades ago. He was convicted of circumventing banking rules in order to pay hush money to one of his victims. He paid $1.7 million to a student whose groin he barely remembers having merely brushed in order to treat a pulled muscle, if you buy his defense.

Then there is the weird story of the leather recliner Hastert positioned in the locker room so that he could watch his wrestlers while they showered. Don't bother trying to imagine how he explained that expense to the school administration; school athletic departments have always gotten considerably more deference than, say, the English department.

Nevertheless, the deal with the recliner was pretty ballsy. I remember that after gym class at my junior high school in the 1970's, we had to parade through a shower room, towels held up above the spray, while the gym teacher stood on an raised platform enclosed by a wall that came up about his chest-level in the center of the shower room, watching to make sure that we were actually getting wet or something.

There were whispers that our coach was enjoying the show more than necessary, but at least he had to stand up. He wasn't relaxing comfortably in an overstuffed La-Z-Boy.

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Coming back to the present, Rep. Jeremy Durham (R-Natcherly), a vocal co-sponsor of the Bathroom Bill speeding through Tennessee's state legislature, has just been found to have a habit of sexually harassing women who have the misfortune to work in his vicinity. The allegations are so numerous that the Secretary of State has issued an official warning that "Representative Durham's alleged behavior may pose a continuing risk to unsuspecting women who are employed by or interact with the legislature." The Speaker of the Tennessee House Beth Harwell has banished Durham from his office, exiling him to an office across the street.

No word on whether he gets to take his La-Z-Boy recliner with him.

Q Toon: Remember Me?

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was indicted last Thursday, accused of  paying someone known as "Individual A" $3.5 million in hush money over a case of sexual misconduct with a male student when he was a high school wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois.

Hastert is not accused of the actual sexual misconduct, the statute of limitations having expired long ago. Instead, he is accused of lying to the FBI about why the former congressman began making large cash withdrawals from his financial accounts in 2010; he had claimed it was due to a lack of confidence in the banking system and that he was keeping the cash.

Making huge cash withdrawals isn't illegal, but banks are required to file a "currency transaction report" on all cash transactions exceeding $10,000 thanks to the Patriot Act, which Hastert had taken credit for crafting and passing in a 2011 interview.

My cartoon, riffing on a 2014 appearance by Hastert on C-SPAN currently gone viral, deals less with the idea of the Patriot Act coming around to bite Hastert in the butt than his voting record on LGBT issues. In addition to Hastert's antigay votes on marriage equality and employment non-discrimination, I could also have included his stance on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

In case you are too young to remember, the Republicans in Congress had forced the appointment of a special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, to look into Whitewater, an Arkansas property scheme in which the Clintons had lost money. Finding nothing impeachment-worthy there, Mr. Starr moved on to investigate charges by Paula Jones that Mr. Clinton had sexually assaulted her while Governor of Arkansas. Finding insufficient evidence of wrong-doing there, too, Mr. Starr proceeded to investigate an apparently consensual extra-marital affair between the President and Monica Lewinsky, a 20-something intern at the White House.

Mr. Starr subpoenaed the President to testify under oath, wherein President Clinton flatly denied the affair. Physical evidence contradicted the President's testimony, so the House voted to impeach. Not over the sex stuff, Republicans protested, but over the perjury.

"Mr. President, I am saddened that there is clear and convincing evidence that the President lied under oath, obstructed justice, and abused the powers of his office in an attempt to cover up his wrong-doing. I regret that the President's behavior puts me in the position of having to vote for these Articles of Impeachment and to pass this matter on to the U.S. Senate for final judgment. ... In this nation, all men are created equal. Simply put, the President in our representative democracy is not a sovereign who is above the law. Tomorrow, we shall pass a difficult vote. The President's inability to abide by the law, the Constitution, and my conscience have all led me to the sound conclusion that impeachment articles must be passed." — Rep. Dennis Hastert, in the Well of the House, December 18, 1998

It is ironic, then, that Hastert, is now charged not with whatever sexual shenanigans he engaged in at Yorkville High, but with lying under oath and paying Individual A off in an effort to evade justice.

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A propos of our discussion the other day of racial and gender diversity in cartoon characters, I blew an opportunity to be ethnically inclusive when I changed the C-SPAN interviewer from Pedro Echevarria to Steve Scully. Mea culpa.