Illustration: Peter Hoey
Tom Coburn: The newly elected senator from Oklahoma warned that “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in Southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”
Ed Schrock: The Virginia representative, husband, father, and practicing Baptist was also a cosponsor of the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and, according to the National Journal, the second most conservative member of the House. Schrock dropped his bid for reelection after blogger Mike Rogers posted voice messages that Schrock allegedly left, trolling for hook-ups, on a gay telephone dating service. “I have to be incredibly careful, incredibly discreet,” the voice on the recording says. “I cannot overemphasize that.”
David Dreier: The California representative has steered dozens of antigay bills through Congress, from a 1998 bill to prevent couples in D.C. from adopting kids to the 2004 Marriage Protection Act. Blogger Rogers also targeted Dreier, granting him the “Roy Cohn Award” for “24 years of working against gay and lesbian rights while living as a gay man yourself.” Such rumors have dogged the 52-year-old bachelor, who, when pressed about his sexuality in an August radio interview, said: “I’m not going to talk about that issue. That’s really not what I’m here about.”
Rick Santorum: The junior senator from Pennsylvania—who denounces sodomy in vivid detail to almost anyone who visits him in the nation’s capital—is nominated simply because he doth protest too much.
John Cornyn: The senator from Texas issued a statement in which he advocated a constitutional ban on gay marriage with the following logic: “It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.”
AND THE WINNER IS… Tom Coburn, who followed up his talk of rampant teen lesbianism with the exhortation, “Now think about it!”—without realizing that most men have been thinking about it since they were 15.
Clarification: The remarks attributed to Senator John Cornyn were included in the text of a speech issued by his office. However, the senator did not make these remarks while delivering the speech.
