10 'family values' Republicans caught in gay sex scandals proving they are GIANT hypocrites

These right-wingers are the definition of hypocrisy!

FACEBOOK @BRIDGETAZIEGLER; Shutterstock; Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images

Republican politicians and conservative Christian leaders won’t stop talking about the benefit of “traditional family values” while villainizing and criminalizing the queer community. They spend their careers trying to stop LGBTQ+ people from achieving equal rights and fighting tooth and nail to enact drag bans, make gender-affirming care illegal, and dehumanize queer people at every turn.

They’ve labeled LGBTQ+ people as sexual deviants and child groomers, all the while living secret lives full of gay sex. The level of hypocrisy is stunning.

It’s happened so many times that it’s almost become predictable at this point. The louder someone is about the righteous conservative Christian lifestyle they’re leading, the more likely they are to be stepping out on their wives or having secret gay affairs because if there is one thing you can count on in life, it’s for Republicans not to practice what they preach.

So here are 10 conservatives who were caught red-handed diving head-first into the gay pond while claiming to be straight as an arrow.

Bridget Ziegler

Sarasota Schools

Sarasota School Board member Bridget Ziegler, who is also the co-founder of the far-right "parents' rights" group Moms for Liberty, has made it her mission to try and keep books with same-sex parents out of the hands of children and stop anyone from mentioning the LGBTQ+ community in schools.

And yet, in predictable fashion, she was caught red-handed when the police recovered a sex tape featuring her and another woman while they were investigating rape allegations against her husband, Christian Ziegler. Bridget Ziegler even admitted to police that she engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman because, apparently, she's allowed to have same-sex relationships, but god forbid someone tell children that gay people exist.

Matt Schlapp

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Matt Schlapp, the current chairman of the American Conservative Union and former White House Director of Police Affairs under George W. Bush, was accused of sexually assaulting a male staffer during a car ride in October 2022. Carlton Huffman, a Republican staffer on Herschel Walker’s US senate campaign who was tasked with driving Schlapp, alleges that Schlapp fondled him without his consent and asked Huffman to come back to his hotel room with him.

Huffman filed a multimillion-dollar sexual misconduct lawsuit against Schlapp in 2022, but this was not the first time the conservative strategist had been accused of sexual misconduct by a man. According to court filings, there was an accusation in 2017 and again in 2022, both of which the ACU was aware of and did nothing about, CNN reports.

Wes Goodman

Conservative Christian lawmaker Wes Goodman was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 2016 and spent his career promoting "the ideals of a loving father and mother" and "a committed natural marriage," (AKA I hate gay people), but then he was caught living a double life, The Advocate reported at the time. It turns out Goodman was having sexual encounters with men online, on the phone, and even having sex with another man in his own state office. Scandalous!

Once reports of the extramarital gay encounters came out, Goodman resigned from office, but it turns out his affairs were an open secret in conservative Republican circles. "Traditional values" conservative organizations like the anti-gay marriage organization, Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community Values, and the Council for National Policy knew about his same-sex dalliances and kept them under wraps despite the blatant hypocrisy.

Larry Craig

Public domain via Wikipedia

Back in 2007, Republican Senator Larry Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after an undercover police officer accused him of soliciting sex in the men's restroom at the Minneapolis, Minn., airport, ABC News reported. After getting caught, a total of eight men came forward and alleged they either had sex with the Idaho lawmaker or were targets of his sexual advances. Craig later tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his guilty plea before resigning after nearly two decades as a senator.

George Rekers

George Rekers co-founded the Family Research Council — a powerful evangelical Christian group that lobbies against gay rights — and spent his career as a homophobe-for-hire, testifying in court cases against gay couples adopting and in support of the Boy Scouts of America when they wanted to keep out gay troupe leaders.

Then he was caught coming back from a European vacation with a male escort in tow.

Reporters from CNN discovered he had hired a 20-year-old from Rentboy.com and caught the two men at the airport coming back from their vacation. Rekers claimed he only hired him to carry his luggage... from Rentboy.com. Sure. Whatever you say, George.

Ted Haggard

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Evangelical pastor Ted Haggard has spent his career spouting conservative Christian talking points while also secretly having sex with men. The founder of the megachurch New Life Church was excommunicated in 2006 after accusations that he paid a male escort for sex and was using methamphetamine came to light. Then, in 2010, he founded Saint James Church, but in 2022, he was accused of having inappropriate sexual contact with two young men in his congregation (one of whom was a minor at the time). His new church quickly fell apart, and he ended up selling the building and starting a church in his own home, the Denver Gazette reports. From prominent megachurch leader to preaching in a micro-church — oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Mark Foley

Public domain via Wikipedia

Former Florida Representative Mark Foley — well known for leading the House caucus on missing and exploited children and fighting for harsher penalties for sexual predators — resigned in 2006 after sexually explicit messages he sent underage Congressional pages came to light, according to NBC News. Not only did this Republican leader clearly have same-sex attractions, but the people he targeted with his inappropriate online messages were under 18. It's almost hard to imagine how someone could be more of a hypocrite than that.

Jon Hinson

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Jon Hinson, a conservative U.S. Representative from Mississippi, was arrested in 1981 in a men's restroom in a Federal office building on Capitol Hill on a charge of oral sodomy with a man who worked for the Library of Congress, the New York Times reported. Hinson ultimately resigned from his post and later in life admitted that he had been living the life of a closeted man when he was arrested. Unlike most Republicans who double down after being caught red-handed, Hinson eventually accepted that he was gay and reevaluated his political stances, even becoming an activist who fought against the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military and founded the Fairfax Lesbian and Gay Citizens Association in Fairfax County, Va. Hinson died of respiratory failure resulting from AIDS in 1995.

Robert Bauman

footage still via C-SPAN

Former Republican U.S. Representative Robert Bauman — who was known as a fierce champion of Conservative causes and the most conservative member of the House — was charged with soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male sex worker in 1980 while he was running for reelection. Later in his career, he worked as a lobbyist for Gay Rights National Lobby and by 2012 was living in the gay enclave of Wilton Manors, but that didn't stop him from continuing to vote Republican, and although he's no longer living in the closet, he said he disagreed with gay marriage, the Washington Blade reported.

Jim Bakker

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Jim Bakker, televangelist and fixture of conservative Christian households of the '80s, who claimed back in 2019 that Democrats wanted to "kill" Donald Trump if they couldn't remove him from office, was taken down by a sex scandal in 1987. Bakker paid hush money to Jessica Hahn, a church secretary, who claimed he sexually assaulted her, and it was also alleged that he had same-sex sexual encounters, ABC News reported.