Republican Family Values, exhibit # 954,335

The far-right oh-so-pius Republican mayor of Spokane, WA, a champion of anti-gay legislation while he the majority leader in the Washington senate, was revealed to be a gay pedophile who used the perks of his office to lure young men he met in online chat rooms. This sort of comi-tragic revelations are routine.

Adding to this story is the debate over the tactics employed by the Spokane Spokesman-Review as part of their investigation. They hired an outside computer expert to pose as a 17 year old male and some say entrap James West, who cruised chat rooms online using the screen names "Rightbi-guy", and "Cobra82nd", a reference to his service in the Army's 82nd Airborne division.

But that's only a side-show, as further investigation has uncovered that West offered two young men jobs and perks if they would have sex with him, and once offered a young man, whom he later appointed to the city's human rights commission, $300 to go swimming naked with him.

And now West is playing the victim, appealing to a civil rights commission and crying that he's being attacked soley for being a gay man. What kind of nerve does it take a person who has spent part of his career enacting legislation that makes life miserable for gays to now suddenly act as though he's a poster-boy for gay discrimination?

Many, many, many of the right wing's most vocal bible-thumpers and loudest moralists are simply over-compensating for their inner demons and sexual desires. It's a mental disorder, and the entire party is largely based upon it. And they currently rule the country and by extention the world. How nice.