Anti-gay activist 'took ten-day holiday with male prostitute'

From the London Daily Mail courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

A leading U.S. anti-gay campaigner has been photographed returning from a European holiday with a male prostitute.

Professor George Rekers, a Baptist minister who believes homosexuality is a sin that can be cured, hired a 20-year-old Puerto Rican as his travelling companion from a website called Rentboy.com.

The 61-year-old father-of-three took the escort, who is known on the gay networking site as 'Geo', on a ten-day trip to London and Madrid.

And

Professor Rekers is widely known in the U.S. In 2008, he testified as an expert in favour of upholding a ban on gay adoption in Florida.

He is also a founding member of the Family Research Council, America's most powerful Christian lobbying group, and has written books about 'curing' homosexuality including Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality.

More here.

This is becoming commonplace.

I mean, I'm really starting to lose count of the number of high profile fundamentalist ministers and "pro-family" politicians who suddenly find themselves in the midst of some sort of sex scandal. Generally, in my humble opinion, such scandals constitute news only if there was some sort of crime committed or if it unmasks a politician or preacher as an asshole hypocrite--in the case of Louisiana Senator David Vitter, we get a two-for-one, crime and hypocrisy, same with the Catholic Church child molestation scandal. Otherwise, it's personal business. But these kinds of scandals, the newsworthy ones involving crime or hypocrisy, are happening so often, I've got to wonder if they're even news anymore.

Maybe the story being missed here is that there are so many scandals in this vein. Do anti-sex right-wing assholes even believe their own rhetoric? And if they don't, why the hell should anyone take them seriously? I mean, of course, I don't take these guys seriously, but that has nothing to do with who they're shagging; I don't take them seriously because they're full of shit at face value. But there are some Americans who love to sit on the fence. Don't these scandals make them think? Isn't the Puritan point of view severely compromised when its champions party with hookers and twinks?

I'd say that this is a wonderful opportunity for the pious among us to take a long hard look in the mirror, a chance to reevaluate their archaic sense of sexual morality, but knowing the pious as I do, I'm quite certain that no such thing will happen soon. Despite all the semen and meth.

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