Michigan state congressman Jon Hoadley hopes to become Michigan's first openly gay Congressman in the United States House of Representatives. But not if Republicans in the state can stop him. And in their attempts, they are using the classic lie of gays being hateful oversexed pedophiles. That's evidenced by the above political ad. And, like so many other times in which our community is branded and stigmatized, the claim is coming from statements taken completely out of context.
According to LGBTQ Nation:
John Hoadley is running as a Democrat for the U.S. House and the Republican super PAC Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) is using words from his Live Journal from 2004 to 2007 to imply that he’s a pedophile who takes meth. At the time, Hoadley was in his early 20s, while his Republican opponent was in the U.S. Congress voting for a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality.CLF’s ad accuses Hoadley of being “creepy” because, the ad claims, he called women “breeders,” said he wanted to “learn about crystal meth,” admitted to having sex with a “victim,” and wrote the words “four-year-old in a thong.”The blog has already been deleted. In context, though, the quotes are very different. He wrote in June 2005 about going to “straight bars” and he used the word “breeder” to refer to straight people of all genders: “I’m not going to lie: breeder=weird/bad dancers.”CLF’s reference to Hoadley wanting to “learn about crystal meth” is even more outrageous: Hoadley was writing about going to a meeting to literally learn about the dangers of the drug and even told his blog’s readers, “Don’t do meth.”The ad’s claim that Hoadley was a sexual predator with a “victim” is a reference to a poem he wrote about calling a man to discuss hooking up: “I turn to my little black book that’s commonly called a cell phone. My fingers walk as I talk to the latest victim of my sexual conquest.” Poetry criticism aside, the line was not about sexual assault, but about talking with a potential partner before having sex.The last line and the one that has received the most attention is the words “four-year-old wearing a thong.” The phrase is from a 2004 blog post where Hoadley posted a text conversation where one of his friends complained about the over-sexualization of children: “I KNOW! I mean I shudder everytime [sic] I see a four-year-old wearing a thong.”
So damn tacky. But unfortunately, so damn typical.
