Sexuality
Glenn Youngkin

Gov. Glenn Youngkin

The Republican Party of Virginia is exploring how low a political party can go with a new set of campaign mailers targeting Democratic state House candidate Susanna Gibson. Last month, the Washington Postreported that Gibson and her husband had performed sex acts for tips on the platform Chaturbate. At the time, Gibson’s Republican opponent, David Owen, ostentatiously took the high road, telling the Post, “I’m sure this is a difficult time for Susanna and her family, and I’m remaining focused on my campaign.” Now, the state Republican Party is using screenshotted images from those livestreams in a campaign mailer.

“Do not open if you are under the age of 18,” the outside of the mailer reads, and, “Warning: Explicit material enclosed.” Inside, “voters found two pieces of paper with censored quotes and screenshots from Gibson’s public porn livestream,” NBC12 reported.

“Glenn Youngkin wants to ban pornhub but had his party campaign committee mail out nude photos of a candidate. He’s a man of privilege that doesn’t understand CONSENT and that should petrify every voter in Virginia. Revenge porn is a crime and that includes in politics,” state Sen. Louise Lucas tweeted in response to the mailer.

That does raise an important question. When Gibson’s Chaturbate streams were first reported, her lawyer suggested to the Post that their preservation and sharing on other sites could constitute revenge porn, citing a Virginia court’s ruling that there is a “stark distinction between an image existing only in someone’s memory … [and] a permanent file that may be shared or re-viewed indefinitely.”

However, the Republican Party’s lawyers were on the case. Virginia does have a statute on “Unlawful dissemination or sale of images of another,” which prohibits the malicious dissemination of “any videographic or still image created by any means whatsoever that depicts another person who is totally nude, or in a state of undress so as to expose the genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or female breast.” However, images of the inside of the mailer aired on local news show that the warnings on the outside about explicit content refer more to quotes from Gibson’s livestream than to the images used, which are not explicit. The spirit of revenge porn is absolutely there, but the letter of the law doesn’t appear to have been violated.

According to the same local news report, Youngkin claimed he didn’t know anything about the mailers—but he was happy to take the opportunity to attack Gibson and talk up Owen. That’s Glenn Youngkin for you. He markets himself as the nice-guy Republican antidote to Trump, but he’s the leader of a state party that’s sending out mailers carefully tiptoeing around the edges of revenge porn laws, and he’ll happily use the controversy around those mailers for political advantage. A total sleazebag, in other words.

Virginia elections expert Larry Sabato suggested that this might be a desperation move by Republicans. “They have decided that this will benefit their candidate. You wonder whether perhaps a private survey indicated that Susanna Gibson was doing better than they expected her to because that is a very competitive district,” he told NBC12.

According to a statement from Gibson’s campaign, “David Owen and the Virginia GOP are trying to distract voters from their extreme agenda to ban abortion, defund schools, and allow violent criminals to access weapons of war. Voters are tired of these desperate attacks, and they will not be fooled by them. From day one, Susanna has been focused on protecting reproductive freedom, fully funding our schools, and keeping our communities safe. Nothing will ever deter her commitment to our community.”

This isn’t the only recent Republican foray into revenge porn, of course, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene showing nonconsensual nude photos of Hunter Biden in a House hearing. When people—or political parties—show you who they are, believe them.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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Iowa's Little Tyrants Have Actually Banned Orwell's ​​​"1984," Because Sex​​​

George Orwell

Show me a book-banner, and I’ll show you a would-be tyrant. The same applies to individuals who seek to promote mandatory speech: What you’re forbidden to read; what you must say. Almost always, such efforts involve everybody’s favorite pastime: judging the intimate lives of others.

Here in Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently went to war against what she described as “woke nonsense” supposedly belittling real women like herself, a mother of three. Arguing that “the left” has “decided ‘woman’ is a dirty word” she issued an executive order—in Iran they’d call it a fatwa—banishing from public documents a bunch of words nobody’s ever seen there.

Rather than “chestfeeding,” Sanders decreed, public documents must use “breastfeeding.” Instead of, “birthing person,” they should say “birth mom.” And so on. During her press conference, the governor became annoyed with a reporter who asked where she’d found the forbidden terms. She cited a Health Department statement warning “pregnant people” to avoid contaminated water.

Good advice, most would think.

Skeptics wondered if Sanders might be trying to distract voters from a ludicrous controversy involving the state’s purchase of a $19,000 lectern from her own PR consultants, not previously known to sell office furniture. Some have noticed that the cost—several times what a similar item sells for on Amazon—closely matches the round-trip, business class airfare from Little Rock to Paris, where the same consultants recently enjoyed the governor’s hospitality during a French air show.

But nobody knows, and the absurd controversy, also involving suspect emails and doctored invoices, goes on even as Gov. Sanders safeguards Arkansas women from “woke” jargon nobody’s ever heard.

Up in Iowa, meanwhile, that state’s aggressively “Christian” governor has signed a bill requiring public schools to remove books depicting a “sex act”—vague language that, as reported by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post, has sent librarians around the state into a fear-based frenzy of book banning.

A short list of classic novels removed from school libraries around Iowa includes Ulysses by James Joyce, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Brave New Worldby Aldous Huxley, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Forrest Gump by Winston Groom.

But the one that really caught my eye was George Orwell’s 1984, the anti-totalitarian classic and the most politically influential novel of the 20th century—unless it was Orwell’s Animal Farm—and one that until quite recently was required reading on high school curricula. I’d go so far as to say that an enemy of that book is an enemy of democracy.

But yes, Orwell believed that the thing that would most horrify readers about Big Brother’s tyrannical government was its intrusion into peoples’ intimate relations. So 1984 tells the story of a doomed love affair between the protagonist, Winston Smith, a re-write man in the Ministry of Truth who alters historical documents to agree with party dogma, and Julia, a co-worker who wears the sash of the “Junior Anti-Sex League” to disguise her secret life.

Their clandestine meeting in the woods outside London is described in terms suitable for a family newspaper: “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory,” Orwell wrote. “It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”

Alas, there’s a video screen in their slum hideaway so the lovers get arrested and tortured for their sins. 1984 is anything but an endorsement of eroticism.

No matter, the book is banned from Iowa schools, about as sinister and farcical a literary event as one can imagine.

Do the pious religious exhibitionists of Iowa imagine that adolescents are being corrupted by reading novels in the library? Do they not understand that most are carrying internet-capable cell phones in their pockets? If they want to read Orwell or watch pornography during study hall, that will be no problem.

Not that pious conservatives are the only literary scolds on the scene. I have recently spent the better part of two weeks enthralled by Robert Galbraith’s 941-page epic The Running Grave: A Cormoran Strike Novel, and regret only that it’s over. Show me a man who hasn’t got a crush on the British detective’s resourceful partner, Robin Ellacott, and I’ll show you a man who has never loved an imaginary woman.

Galbraith, of course, is the pseudonym of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, probably the best-selling English novelist in history. But you won’t find The Running Grave reviewed in any of the usual places, because the author has sinned against left-wing dogma on “transgender” issues and been relegated to “un-person” status among the bookish.

It all started in a dispute over whether a transgendered woman who’d committed rapes as a man should be incarcerated among biological women in a Scottish prison. Rowling thought not, and as she appears to rather enjoy public controversy, has made herself a pariah on the gender-obsessed left.

It’s always people’s sex lives, isn’t it?

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner, a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.