Indefensible

Sickening.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing...

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

Just to note, the age of consent in Alabama was and still is sixteen. Leigh Corfman was fourteen when this started. No matter how you excuse this, it was... it IS statutory rape.

And Moore was a district attorney at the time. HE'S SUPPOSED TO KNOW THE LAW. HE'S SUPPOSED TO UPHOLD IT.

Two of Corfman’s childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.

Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the three women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.

Moore may not have forced them, but he went after them sexually. An older man, chasing after HIGH SCHOOL AGE GIRLS.

Wendy Miller says she was 14 and working as a Santa’s helper at the Gadsden Mall when Moore first approached her, and 16 when he asked her on dates, which her mother forbade. Debbie Wesson Gibson says she was 17 when Moore spoke to her high school civics class and asked her out on the first of several dates that did not progress beyond kissing. Gloria Thacker Deason says she was an 18-year-old cheerleader when Moore began taking her on dates that included bottles of Mateus Rosé wine. The legal drinking age in Alabama was 19.

Of the four women, the youngest at the time was Corfman, who is the only one who says she had sexual contact with Moore that went beyond kissing. She says they did not have intercourse...

I actually started writing this blog entry last night, but I've been so enraged by this story and the expanding revelations that it's taking me this long to compose myself to compose this.

And before any of you lot jump on me for being a Bill Clinton fan considering all the sexist shit he's pulled, I have condemned Bill's sexual dalliances as folly and wrongheaded. And for all the accusations aimed at him - especially a possible rape allegation that has some teeth to it - Clinton's never been a teen stalker (His affair with Lewinsky happened when she was 22).

I have no love for sexual predators. I really have no love for holier-than-thou religious hypocrites who eagerly bash everyone else for being sinful while they themselves commit greater sins.

And in the time it's taken for me to write this out, OF COURSE there are many Republican political figures at the Alabama and National levels who are making the immoral decision to BACK Moore even as these stories threaten to expose more sordid tales.

I came across this on Twitter this afternoon:

Carroll Bryant‏ @CarrollBryant

Replying to @tpe3tpj2 @FiveRights

I'd rather have a pedophile in office rather than a democrat any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Pedophiles only screw kids while democrats screw everyone.

7:30 AM - 10 Nov 2017

THIS IS coming from a self-proclaimed arch-conservative (yet proudly) INDEPENDENT VOTER who seems to genuinely think that Democrats are the ultimate scourge of humanity.

THIS is how low the Far Right have sunk. Their hate and disdain for Democrats, progressives, and essentially EVERYBODY NOT IN THEIR CLOSED CIRCLE have gotten them to where they will proudly, eagerly vote in corrupt, contemptible, violent monsters all because they've been taught that Democrats are worse.

This is how trump got into the White House. Enough voters bought the Fox Not-News Narrative of DEMOCRATS BAD that when caught between the choice of A) the corrupt and bankrupted failed businessman with no experience or intellect and who bragged about being a Pussy-Grabber assaulting his own partners' wives or B) the Democratic candidate who just happened to be Hillary Clinton the MOST HATED DEMOCRAT THE REPUBLICANS AND FAR RIGHT EVER HATED SIMPLY BECAUSE SHE EXISTS, they sided with the corrupt and failed bankrupt businessman who SURPRISE SURPRISE is incapable of governance and has been committing impeachable acts in office since Day One (not to mention mismanaging the nation into a chaotic mess that will collapse on itself. It's not a question of IF it's a matter of WHEN).

The Republicans would rather vote in criminals, sexual predators, con artists all because those dark forces offer them the fantasy of power and control, of being lords of the realms rather than the poor unwashed masses they deem parasites.

There may be sexual predators and con artists among the Democratic ranks - Anthony Weiner, John Edwards, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer - but when exposed for their sins they fall out of favor/power and even wind up in jail (save for Clinton, whose predatory nature balanced out with a persona that presented itself as pro-women even as he skirt-chased them). Republican campaigners and voters excuse their monsters - Bill O'Reilly just got his job back even after public exposure of his harassment of women, David Vitter got re-elected after getting caught hiring call girls, Newt Gingrich never goes away after getting caught committing adultery, Mark Sanford may have lost his governorship but South Carolinians voted him to Congress, and for the love of GOD they voted trump - and eagerly push them higher into elected offices or bigger book deals.

This is insane. The Republican Party keeps claiming they are the "Family Values Party" but the only value they see in families is how much they can shred those families into poverty-stricken, emotionally scarred, and physically abused wrecks. Family Values, my ass.

Their ongoing support of a monster like Roy Moore by using twisted interpretations of Biblical teachings is proof the Republican Far Right - self-proclaimed moralists who praise themselves as God's Chosen thumping those Bibles as though they were weapons - are no true Christians. They're just selling another lie about their faith, because they ONLY THING they believe is winning elections and destroying innocent lives.

When I wrote that the Republican Party was dead, this was what I meant. There is no soul here, no empathy or morality or ethical practice that would make a political party work. Just cons and criminals, issuing lie after lie and committing sin after sin, a shambling zombie infecting the nation and the world with their taint.

What the hell, America.

What the hell, Alabama, that you should side with the child rapist to represent you. What the hell.