http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100

Apparently, the town of Dauphin, Manitoba was used for a sociological experiment in the 1970s, in which every resident was given a guaranteed minimum income regardless of their circumstances. They were then compared to residents of nearby towns in similar economic straits but without this program in operation. The result: contrary to popular belief, it did not cause people to stop working. The only people who worked less under the guaranteed minimum income program were teenagers (who tended to go back to school) and new mothers (who tended to raise their children). In both cases, that is an outcome that most people find desirable. This tears a big hole in the popular conservative notion that minimum income would make people stop working: apparently, nobody is particularly happy to live on a minimum income, and rather than simply laying about on it, will use it as a springboard to attempt to move up the socio-economic ladder.

http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/

A researcher named Joe Henrich decided to conduct numerous psychological experiments which had been done before in the US, but he conducted them on residents of foreign cultures. The results were startling: many of the conclusions drawn by psychologists from prior research on Americans were assumed to be universal human traits, but were in fact unique to Americans. This has many far-reaching ramifications for the field of psychology, since the bulk of psychological research has been conducted on Americans.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa022033

According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2003, the administrative overhead cost of American health care is roughly three times as high per capita as the administrative overhead cost of Canadian health care. Not only does this blow a hole in the widespread assumption that private industry is always more efficient than government, but it explains much of the soaring cost of American health care.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

“Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha And Jamal?” Researchers conducted experiments in which they sent out resumes with identical information except for one difference: “white-sounding” versus “ethnic-sounding” names. The results were startling: white-sounding names received 50% more call-backs for interviews after sending out otherwise identical resumes. Not only that, but the effect of higher-quality resumes was more pronounced for the people with white-sounding names. Variations of this study have been conducted independently in different areas, with similar results. For those who call for an end to “affirmative action”, this study rather inconveniently points out that the raison d’etre for affirmative action still continues to exist, and that it merely levels the playing field rather than unfairly tilting it toward minorities.

http://www.asanet.org/press/conservatives_trust_has_fallen.cfm

An excerpt:

While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to new research from Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

“You can see this distrust in science among conservatives reflected in the current Republican primary campaign,” said Gauchat, whose study appears in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. “When people want to define themselves as conservatives relative to moderates and liberals, you often hear them raising questions about the validity of global warming and evolution and talking about how "intellectual elites" and scientists don’t necessarily have the whole truth.”

Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to self-identified moderates and liberals, and ended the period with the lowest.

In addition to examining how the relationship between political ideology and trust in science changed over almost 40 years, Gauchat also explored how other social and demographic characteristics — including frequency of church attendance — related to trust in science over that same period. Gauchat found that, while trust in science declined between 1974 and 2010 among those who frequently attended church, there was no statistically significant group-specific change in trust in science over that period among any of the other social or demographic factors he examined, including gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

“This study shows that the public trust in science has not declined since the mid-1970s except among self-identified conservatives and among those who frequently attend church,” Gauchat said. “It also provides evidence that, in the United States, there is a tension between religion and science in some contexts. This tension is evident in public controversies such as that over the teaching of evolution.”

(Emphasis added)

So it’s not hyperbole after all: right-wing conservative politics really are attempting to draw us back into medieval thinking.

In this video, Richard Dawkins discusses the laryngeal nerve, which travels all the way down to the heart, loops around an artery, and then goes back up the larynx. It has to innervate both the heart and the larynx, but of course, if an engineer were to design this, he would have it innervate the larynx first, then go down to the heart. Not the other way around. It even does this in the very long neck of a giraffe, which means that we’re talking about twenty feet of unnecessary nerve length.

As Dr. Dawkins points out, the only imaginable reason for this “design” is that we evolved from fish, which have no neck, and so it doesn’t matter that the nerve loops around like that. I wonder what creationists would use as a talking point here? Would they pull out the old “God works in mysterious ways” canard, or perhaps the ever-popular “there must be a good reason”? How about “why would God act like a human engineer, when he is God?” (the last one is particularly amusing, because the assumption that he “designed” every species rather than letting them evolve implicitly assumes that he was acting like a human engineer).

Civility? Americans thought the lesson of a deranged shooting was “civility”? Are you kidding me? Let’s get this straight, folks: the problem with American political discourse before January 8, 2011 was not a lack of civility: it was a lack of rationality. Do people say that the problem with the shooter himself was a lack of civility? Of course not; they say it was a lack of rationality: the man was deranged. Why do they not look similarly at the inflammatory statements being made by their politicians and pundits? Why do we assume the problem with these statements is their lack of civility rather than their lack of logic? Here’s the problem: if the accusations were actually true, then they absolutely should be stated in inflammatory language. People complain about the style when they should be complaining about the substance.

When politicians accuse their opponents of “trying to destroy the country”, the problem is not “a lack of civility”; it is a lack of reason. Put simply, these wild accusations are not a logical or reasonable conclusion to draw from their opponents’ actions or statements. If you get people to express the same sentiments in more cautious language, that does not improve the situation. In fact, it only hastens the return of the wild-eyed rhetoric, because people will (correctly) see sooner or later that you’re just obsessing with appearances, and ask “why should we cover up our truths in cloying language”? The problem is that they think totally irrational conclusions are “truths”, and no one calls them out on what is really wrong with them, because that would be “uncivil”.

When someone seriously thinks that millions of his countrymen actually want to destroy their own country, the problem is not that he’s “uncivil”; the problem is that he’s either stupid or insane. There have to be dozens of different explanations for their motivations other than “trying to destroy the country”, all of which are going to make more sense. But you can’t accuse him of being an idiot or a lunatic, can you? Oh no, you can’t say that because it would be uncivil! So instead, he gets to say utterly deranged or idiotic things, and you can only admonish him if he’s rude about it. Otherwise, you’re supposed to restrict yourself to politely disagreeing while respecting his earnestness.

Paul Gallico said that “No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.” The British know that sometimes, you have to be able to declare that someone is a bloody idiot, and to do it properly, you’ll have to explain precisely how you arrived at this conclusion. Here is an example of a British person demonstrating his superior prowess of insult:

John Cleese on Sarah Palin, in an October 2008 interview:

People watching her on television, can they not see that she’s basically learned certain speeches? And she does them very well; she’s got very good memory. But it’s like a nice-looking parrot because the parrot speaks beautifully and kind of says, “aw shucks” every now and again but doesn’t really have any understanding of the meaning of the words that it is producing, even though it’s producing them very accurately. And she’s been in these training sessions with Cheney’s pals, and she’s learned these speeches, and the extraordinary thing is that so many people are taken in by it.

And the truth is that Sarah Palin is no way good enough. And if you lined up from Europe left-wingers, centrists, right-wingers, you wouldn’t find ten percent. You really wouldn’t find five percent who think she’s good enough to run the United States. And she’s running as the partner of a 72 year old cancer survivor. I mean, Monty Python could have written this.

Is he being “uncivil”? He’s certainly being insulting. He’s saying she doesn’t really understand what she’s saying in her campaign speeches, and that she’s acting like a trained parrot. Of course, we all secretly knew as much. Do you recall the 2008 vice presidential debate, when Gwen Ifill asked both candidates if circumstances might force them to break any campaign promises and Palin answered by changing the subject and saying “I want to go back to the energy plan” where she had some prepared talking points ready? She didn’t even change the subject gracefully; she just clumsily said “I want to go back” to a subject where she had memorized something to say. Mr. Cleese’s insult may be harsh, but it’s also obviously based on real observations: things we all noticed but were reluctant to put into so many words. Now compare this to the way Sarah Palin will attack someone, even in a high-profile prepared speech. From her Republican National Convention campaign speech in 2008, about Obama:

Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay … he wants to meet them without preconditions. Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America … he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights?

Is this “uncivil”? Perhaps no more so than what John Cleese said about her. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s uncivil; the problem is that it’s absolutely idiotic. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world works, and the way civilized societies work. Accusing someone of being a terrorist sympathizer for merely being open to negotiation with Iran (the country she referred to as a “terrorist state”) is just childish; what exactly is accomplished by refusing to even speak with them? Hell, even Nixon went to China. And the point of due process and civil rights in modern countries is not that we want to coddle criminals, but that we don’t decide someone is a criminal until he’s had his day in court!. What part of Basic Civics 101 (or basic human rights, for that matter) does Sarah Palin not understand? Does she believe that if someone has been accused, then he must be guilty? The problem with this kind of statement is not the incivility; it is the stupidity. And ironically, we’re not allowed to point a finger at the problem and call someone “stupid” when we’re busy obsessing over “civility” instead.

Any atheist who has dealt with Christian supremacists for long enough has encountered the Stalin Argument. It goes like this: “Stalin was an atheist, and he killed 20 million people, making him history’s greatest butcher. Atheism has killed more people than religion.” Some Christian supremacists falsely claim that Hitler was an atheist, and add him into this argument as well, but that one is easily refuted (all of Hitler’s anti-Christian quotes are uncorroborated claims from third-party sources, while Hitler’s pro-Christian quotes are in Mein Kampf, which is indisputably authentic, and the German people, who enthusiastically supported Hitler, were definitely Christian). In any case, returning to Stalin, can you spot the logic problems here? Let’s go through them one at a time:

1) False Cause Fallacy (specifically, assuming that coincidence = causality): if you claim that Andrea Yates’ religious beliefs led to her terrible crime (she drowned her own children), a Christian supremacist would immediately point out that her Christian faith and her crimes are not necessarily connected just by virtue of cohabiting in the same person. Why do they not see that the same is true for Stalin and his megalomania? Stalin never even claimed that atheism had anything to do with his policies, unlike Andrea Yates who actually did claim that her religious beliefs led to her actions (she even explained how; apparently, she wanted her children to enter Heaven in a state of grace, before being corrupted by the materialistic and sinful world).

2) Strawman Fallacy (specifically, assuming that atheism teaches personal conduct): in order for Stalin to be motivated by atheism, atheism would have teach a code of behaviour, just as religion does. In fact, that is not true at all; atheism does not have any particular set of moral teachings. It is merely the absence of a particular kind of belief, and as such, it does not tell you how to live. When someone claims that Stalin was motivated by atheism, he is implicitly assuming that atheism actually teaches people how to live and what to do. In fact, it does no such thing. By pretending otherwise, Christian supremacists are grossly misrepresenting what atheism is. In reality, atheism is not a religion. It does not tell you how to live, or who is good or who is evil (or even that there is such a thing as good and evil), or who you can marry, or when you’re allowed to have sex. Let’s put this another way: Christians do not believe in Zeus; does disbelief in Zeus motivate them to do anything in particular, other than resist when people try to make them worship Zeus? Of course not. So why should disbelief in God motivate anyone to do anything, other than resisting when people try to make them worship God? Since atheism has no moral code of its own, an atheist could be a communist, a humanist, an objectivist, a utilitarian, or a subscriber to any number of other moral value systems.

3) Complex Cause Fallacy (chalking up the unprecedented size of 20th century death tolls to belief systems alone): While warfare reached unprecedented heights of destructiveness in the 20th century, it is an example of the complex cause fallacy to assume that this was due to belief systems alone, and not other factors. One rather obvious alternative cause is improved technology: humanity’s methods of killing reached new heights in the 20th century, thanks to the development of aerial bombing, nuclear weapons, mechanized logistics, modern artillery, etc. Historical butchers like Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great were utterly ruthless, but their death tolls were limited by the technology available to them (not to mention the limited size of populations in their day).

4) Ignoring proportions: following from the previous point, the huge death tolls of 20th century warfare, while shocking and unprecedented in sheer magnitude, are not proportionally unprecedented. You can’t look at numbers without looking at the size of the population they come from: one hundred murders per year in a city with a population of 5 million are proportionally far less than five murders per year in a town with a population of only 20 thousand. In 1940, the population of the USSR was roughly 190 million people. If we were to accept the popular (but most likely exaggerated) estimates of Stalin killing at least 20 million of his own countrymen, that adds up to a bit more than 10% deaths: a horrible figure to be sure, but nowhere close to what Julius Caesar did in his conquest of Gaul, where he was estimated to have exterminated roughly one third of the population of Gaul. Not to mention the fate of the Native Americans, whose population was reduced by more than 95%: a truly incredible death toll the likes of which we rarely see in history, and which was definitely perpetrated by Christians.

5) Inaccurate Data: the “20 million dead” figure has been widely reported, but it was reported at a time when western scholars had almost no access to actual data from behind the “Iron Curtain”, so they engaged in a lot of speculation. After the fall of communism, much more data has been made available, and scholars have revised their estimates downward. For example, estimates of Ukrainian famine deaths have been lowered from 12 million to 2-4 million. Meanwhile, Russia lost at least 25 million dead to Nazi Germany during World War 2. If we compare Stalin to Hitler, Hitler has a much larger death toll, so the claim that Stalin is history’s greatest butcher is false (even if we ignore point #4 above). It’s also worth noting that Imperial Japan’s butchery of Chinese civilians (estimated at 12 million dead) is usually ignored when making these comparisons, and that both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were religious (Hitler even appointed himself head of the church).

The more thoughtful Christians usually don’t use the Stalin Argument, but Christian supremacists always use it, so it would behoove any atheist to know it in advance, and be ready for it.

I’m not saying that you need to become a Buddhist or start meditating, but you should at least know something about Buddhism, because Buddhism is easily the world’s most well-known and popular atheistic religion.

Yes, that’s right: Buddhism has no deities. The Buddha himself was considered a philosopher and teacher, not a god. That’s not to say it doesn’t have any scientifically unsound beliefs (there’s really no logic behind Nirvana), but it definitely does not have deities.

This is important to know because Christians tend to be locked into a mindset which says that there are basically two choices in life: religion (by which they mean “a religion like mine”) and atheism. The idea of a well-known and respected atheistic religion is a bit of a mind-blower to them; most Christians think that Buddha is just an eastern version of Jesus.

Pointing out the existence of a respected atheistic religion throws a bit of a wrench into their thinking, and may help deflect the inevitable accusation that atheists either have no morality or are all Communists. Of course, there are logical ways to refute those assumptions, but human beings are not very logical creatures. I find that it works better to approach them from the standpoint of a rival religion than no religion at all, if they’re the type who are willing to listen at all.

Christians may say it’s hard to be a Christian in modern society, but they’ve never tried being an atheist. As a general rule, there are a lot of situations when you should pretend to be a Christian:

1. Meeting your girlfriend’s Christian parents for the first time. Seriously, I’ve heard many stories (and experienced similar) in which massive conflict erupted the instant a girlfriend’s parents discovered that a guy was an atheist. You can’t keep it a secret forever, but you should avoid making it part of your first impression. Give them a chance to get to know you before you drop the A-bomb on them.
2. Business networking. While Christians may say “love thy neighbour”, there seems to be a silent addendum: “but feel free to discriminate on the basis of religion”. Like it or not, Christians reserve a much higher degree of trust for fellow Christians. You can choose to exploit this or be injured by it. For example, if your line of work requires business networking, it’s a good idea to become a member of a local church, because Christians preferentially give business to other Christians. The choice really is yours, because one of the nice things about atheism is that there is no deity to get offended by your apparent disloyalty.
3. Christian funerals. At the funeral of a Christian, you can guarantee that other Christians will be there and will talk about God quite a bit. They might say things which annoy you or even offend you. However, it doesn’t last very long, so just shut up and go along with it. Don’t be a dick.
4. Arguing with a Christian about social welfare. For some reason, the Christian majority in North America seems to have taken a collective stance against social welfare, even though Jesus preached in favour of it (and don’t let them pull that “leave that to individuals and not the state” crap; they have absolutely no problem using the state to enforce other teachings of their religion, like “prostitution is immoral”). However, since atheism = “no morality” in the eyes of many Christians, you’re in for a whole lot of extra (and unnecessary and irrelevant) arguments defending atheism if you self-declare as an atheist. Better to pretend you’re Christian long enough to guilt-trip him about what Jesus would think of his selfishness. Turn the tables so that you get to be the sanctimonious Jesus freak for once. It can be a fun change of pace.
5. When your host says grace. If you’re a guest in someone’s house and they’re saying a prayer of thanks to their god, just go along with it. You don’t have to say anything; just shut up for a minute. It’s not really much of an imposition. You’re a guest in someone else’s house; it’s common courtesy. Once again, don’t be a dick.
6. If you want to volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America. Volunteering to help raise the next generation can be very rewarding, regardless of whether you believe in a god or not. Unfortunately, the BSA does not see it that way: if you’re an atheist, they will kick you out (The Boy Scouts of Canada are more open, and they will accept any kind of spiritual belief, including atheistic ones). You could try to fight that sort of thing in court, but I wouldn’t count on winning, and after a bitter legal battle, I doubt any of the other parents would want you around anyway. Just go along with it. Yes, I know, it means letting the bigots win. Sometimes, life is like that.
7. Politics. Most of us will never run for political office. However, if you do, especially for a high office, you had best pretend to be Christian. No openly atheistic person will ever be elected President of America in our lifetimes. A lot of the confusing religious behaviour of early American leaders (eg- making public speeches extolling Biblical virtues while privately writing heretical things to friends) make perfect sense if they were following this rule.
8. Texas. Seriously, why take the risk? They’re super-reactionary, they’re armed, and they think they prove their patriotism by abusing outsiders. Don’t pick a fight with a psycho.

Rule #1: It’s OK to say “Oh My God”

I often hear comedians (who no doubt think they’re being hilariously original) asking what atheists say instead of “Oh my God”. But it’s not just comedians; regular people ask that too, and even some atheists struggle with the question.

However, the real question should be: why is this a question at all? Why can’t atheists say “Oh my God” in moments of shock?

“Atheists can’t say that because they don’t believe in God!” you might answer. And that seems to make sense … until you ask why the word “Herculean” persists in the English language. When a Christian says “Lou Ferrigno landed the role because of his Herculean physique”, he is not saying “I believe in the Greek demigod Hercules”. When a Christian refers to a Trojan horse, he is not saying that he believes Homer’s tale is historically accurate. When a Christian accuses another of being “narcissistic”, he is not saying that he believes in the Tale of Narcissus. When Christians went to see “The Poseidon Adventure” in theatres, they were not declaring fealty to an ancient Greek god of the sea.

The fact is that Christians use these phrases not because they secretly believe in Zeus, but because Greek mythology is part of the cultural history of western civilization. Similarly, Christianity is and will be a part of the cultural history of western civilization for the foreseeable future. If people still refer to Greco-Roman mythological figures nearly two thousand years after the death of Hellenistic paganism, then it seems safe to say people will still be blurting out various Christian terms long after we’re all dead.

In short, if you’re an atheist, go ahead: say “Oh God” during sex. Say “Jesus Christ!” as an expletive. The effort you put into creating your own custom expletives is wasted and will accomplish nothing, other than to make people look at you funny. You’re an atheist now; those words have no actual power over you, so stop acting as if you’re afraid of them.

Of course, you know what a bullshit expert is. You see them on TV all the time. Political pundits, paid consultants, lobbyists, politicians, lawyers, Madison Avenue advertising men, and a host of other bullshit experts dominate the way we think about the world, right down to your average used-car salesman. What’s more, they’re very, very good at it.

In the political arena, scientists are simply outgunned. The anti-global warming guy threw out a bunch of vague claims about temperature going up and down in certain parts of the world, the pro global warming person replied by making equally vague claims about how scientists look at long-term trends rather than short ones. Unfortunately, to a casual observer, both sides appear to be making equally valid points, and in a sense they are, because neither one is really backed up with anything. The problem is that the supporting data is much too complicated to explain in 30 seconds on a TV show, so the scientist expects that you will actually investigate further on your own. After all, that’s how scientists behave when they see competing claims in science journals. But that is not what the public does: the public responds to such an exchange by assuming that both sides are equally unreasonable.

I find this situation unbelievably frustrating. Almost 100% of the debate about global warming focuses on temperature trends, and it’s easy to confuse people about temperature trends. After all, temperatures go up here, they go down there, it doesn’t seem to add up to anything convincing, right? Scientists have done an absolutely lousy job of explaining why they’re so confident in the warming trend. Part of it is because science is complicated and hard to explain to people, and part of it is the fact that they’re just not that good at this marketing stuff.

I’m no marketing expert either, but let me see if I can give it a crack. There are three things you need to understand about global warming:

1. Temperature is a sign of warming or cooling, but it is not actually the same thing as warming or cooling. It is very superficial, in the same way that the Dow Jones industrial average is a rather superficial indicator of the economy. It is also much more volatile than the underlying warming or cooling trends, again just like the Dow Jones. Heating and cooling are actually a function of energy, not temperature.
2. To understand the difference between energy and temperature in a climate, consider the analogy of energy and weight in your body. If you’re taking in more calories than you burn every day, then you’ll gain weight. Does this mean you’ll necessarily gain weight tomorrow? No, your weight might fluctuate due to other factors. You might be heavier tomorrow, but you might be lighter. You’ll get some confusing data if you check your weight every 10 minutes, but if you’re eating the same diet you ate years ago but your physical activity level has plummeted, then you know what will happen.
3. So how do scientists know that the Earth is getting fat on energy? Simple: they’ve conducted experiments on CO2 which prove that increased CO2 levels in the upper atmosphere will block some of the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth. In other words, the Earth isn’t shedding as many calories every day as it used to. It’s like an athlete who’s become a couch potato. He may not eat precisely the same thing every day, so his weight might fluctuate from day to day, but over the long term, you know he’ll gain weight. Similarly, there might be fluctuations in non CO2-related environmental factors, but given the fact that CO2 reduces the amount of calories we shed every day, the conclusion is inescapable: high CO2 levels will make the Earth warmer than it would otherwise have been. Even if we hit a cooling period, it would have been more of a cooling period if there were less CO2 in the atmosphere, and when we switch back to a warming period, the CO2 will make it worse than it would otherwise have been.

Of course, I don’t really expect global warming deniers to give the matter any serious thought, but if you’re one of those fence-sitters who doesn’t understand why scientists are totally unfazed by confusing temperature data or the existence of alternate warming/cooling mechanisms, maybe that will help. Yes, the Earth does have a lot of warming and cooling mechanisms, but the increased CO2 level means that we’re not shedding as many calories every day as we otherwise would, so whatever happens with those other mechanisms, the CO2 will make it warmer than it would otherwise have been.

http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-ashburn-arrest,0,4135863.story

An excerpt:

“Family Values” Senator Ashburn Gets DUI Leaving Gay Bar

SACRAMENTO — The county district attorney says Republican state Sen. Roy Ashburn’s blood-alcohol level was .14 percent when he was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving after leaving Faces, a gay bar and nightclub.

Ashburn has voted against every gay rights measure the senate has voted upon, according to Project Vote Smart.

The California Highway Patrol says the Bakersfield lawmaker was arrested early Wednesday after he was spotted driving erratically. Ashburn was taken to the Sacramento County Jail, booked and then released.

Ashburn, the married father of four, was reportedly driving with a male passenger who was not identified.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, Shelly Orio, said Thursday that a breath test showed Ashburn’s blood alcohol level was .06 percent above the legal limit.

He was released on $1,400 bond.

The lawmaker was a no-show on the Senate floor Thursday. The state-owned vehicle he was driving when he was arrested has been impounded at the Capitol, Senate sergeant-at-arms Tony Beard Jr. said.

Congratulations, Senator Ashburn. You get the Republican trifecta: DUI, improper personal use of a taxpayer-owned vehicle, and being caught picking up a guy at a gay bar!

So how many hypocritical “family values” conservatives do we have now? Let’s see, we have:

• Jim Bakker, televangelist. Caught embezzling money and having sex with his secretary.
• Jimmy Swaggart, televangelist. Charged with soliciting sex from prostitutes. Famously made a tearful apology on TV.
• Ken Calvert (R-CA), who blasted Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinski. Caught by police receiving oral sex from a prostitute. At least Bill didn’t have to pay for his blowjob.
• Jim Bunn (R-OR), elected with Christian Coalition support, whereupon he immediately divorced his wife to marry an employee (who also mysteriously received a huge pay raise).
• Newt Gingrich, Republican House Speaker, harsh critic of Bill Clinton’s sexual infidelity. Married 3 times, cheated on first wife with a campaign staffer, and was fined $300,000 by the House Ethics Committee for misuse of funds.
• Beverly Russell, executive member of SC Republican executive committee, sexually molested his step-daughter Susan Smith (yes, the same Susan Smith who went insane and drowned her own children).
• Helen Chenoweth (R-ID), blasted Bill Clinton for his adultery but later admitted a long adulterous affair herself.
• Daniel Crane (R-IL), another “family values” crusader, had sex with an underage congressional page.
• John Fund, Wall Street Journal columnist, GOP fundraiser, and anti-abortion crusader, impregnated the daughter of an old girlfriend and then encouraged her to have an abortion.
• Reverend Stephen White, “family values” preacher active at Yale, arrested for offering money to a 14 year old boy for oral sex.
• Brent Parker (R-UT), arrested for soliciting gay sex from an undercover officer.
• Robin Vanderwall, director of the Faith and Family alliance, arrested for criminal solicitation of a minor.
• Paul Crouch, director of the Christian Trinity Broadcasting Network, paid $425000 to silence an alleged gay lover.
• Jim West, Republican mayor of Spokane who crusaded against abortion, gays, and premarital sex. Had a gay affair with a male teenager.
• Dr. David Hager, Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), wrote numerous books on sexual morality and tried to ban the “morning after” pill. Had an adulterous affair.
• Ted Haggard, hard-line right-wing “family values” preacher, seen in “Jesus Camp” lecturing people on sexual morality. Resigned after being caught with a male prostitute and crystal meth.
• Mark Foley (R-FL), famously caught soliciting underage congressional pages for gay sex.
• Lou Beres, former executive director of the Oregon Christian Coalition. Confessed to police that he fondled under-aged girls.
• Jon Matthews, Republican talk show host in Houston, indicted for exposing his genitals to a teenaged girl.
• Larry Craig (R-ID), yet another “family values” and anti-gay crusader. Famously caught soliciting sex in a men’s airport bathroom.
• Robert Allen (R-FL), arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover officer in a men’s bathroom.
• Daniel Dean Thompson, a Utah retailer of bowdlerized movies (with the dirty parts cut out), arrested for sexually molesting a 14 year old.
• Mark Sanford, Republican governor of SC. Family-values crusader, was being groomed by the GOP as a possible presidential candidate in 2012. Famously caught using taxpayer money to fly to Argentina and have sex with his Argentinian mistress, who he publicly called his “soul mate”. Refused to resign despite numerous calls to do so from both parties.
• And of course, as of today we have this douche-bag Ashburn.

Feel free to look up any or all of these incidents. It is by no means a complete list. For a much longer, fully referenced list, see:
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Republican_Sex_Scandals

Also, for fun, see:
http://www.badmouth.net/top-five-republican-gay-sex-scandals/
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october172007/repub_scandals_10_17_07.php

Moral of the story: if you see someone ranting about “family values”, you should keep a watchful eye on your kids.