Mike Rogers has a great post over at AlterNet that ought to be a warning/lesson to GOP politicians who are so busy trying to as kiss the far right religious extremists that they set themselves up to be paraded out as fool when the lies of the Christianists begin to unravel. Florida's Attorney General (and GOP gubernatorial candidate) Bill McCollum - pictured at left - is a case in point and now his pandering to the far right by hiring rent boy loving George Rekers is coming home to roost. Either McCollum is a fool or he was funneling money to Christianist allies to try to prove his far right bona fides. Either way, his involvement with Rekers and his squandering of $120,000 in taxpayer money on testimony he had to was false and labeled so by other courts is justifiably biting him in the ass. Here are some highlights which hopefully other GOP candidates will take a lesson from and think twice before they get in bed with professional gay-haters and faux Christians like Rekers (in Virginia, The Family Foundation is just as fraudulent as Rekers, yet GOP politicians still grovel and kiss Victoria Cobb's ring):*
When George Rekers, the 61-year-old founder of the rabidly anti-gay Family Research Council showed up full of junk science, discredited testimony and a willingness to say anything to defend Florida's ban on gays adopting children, McCollum saw an ideological bargain at any price.
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This, of course, is the same George Rekers that cable TV pundits comedians and bloggers have had a field day with after he was caught returning from a two-week European vacation with a male escort he'd hired from Rentboy.com. While rentboy (codename Lucien) says Rekers paid him for nude sexual massages, Rekers said the 20-year old was only there to "carry his luggage." (See: "hiking the Appalachian Trail" and "wide stance.")
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[T]he real story has little to do with an anti-gay leader hiring a male prostitute on rentboy.com; it's the story of yet another Republican elected official actively funding fraud with public money.
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Rekers is part of a small cadre of homophobes-for-hire who charge top dollar for their bogus expert witness testimony despite the fact that they've been discredited over and over again. And while he has tried to distance himself from the story, records now reveal that McCollum personally vouched for Rekers and insisted he be hired over the initial objections of the Florida Department of Children and Families.
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"I will not do it again,'' McCollum told reporters yesterday, "I wouldn't do it again if I knew what I know today but I didn't know that then and neither did anybody else.'' He didn't know? Doesn't Google work in the Attorney General's office? He didn't know? In 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Cindy Lederman said Rekers was not a credible witness
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In 2004 Rekers testified in an Arkansas gay adoption case. In his ruling, Pulaski County Circuit Court judge Timothy Fox specifically called Rekers' testimony, "extremely suspect", and said that Rekers "was there primarily to promote his own personal ideology."
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What did McCollum do? He paid an unqualified zealot who will endorse McCollum's anti-gay political posturing under the guise of "expert testimony." Bill McCollum did it because he was willing to pay for a discredited witness who would ignore the clear scientific facts and the real, lived experience of millions of gay parents and their children to bring a hateful, ideologically driven message about gay people.
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Hiring rent boys like Lucien for European trips is one thing, hiring political rent boys like Rekers, paid to move an extremist agenda is something entirely different. Floridians want their money back.
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