One of the things that’s fun about the Teabaggers is that they seem to be having a contest to see which state can run the most obviously insane people for national office. See: Christine O’Donnell of Delaware:
Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell has a robust evangelical outreach program, and she’s appealed to these voters in her Republican primary bid in part with her old-fashioned views about sex.
O’Donnell has said, for example, that masturbation is wrong, and that looking at pornography is equivalent to cheating on your spouse.
She said some of these things in 1998 in an article that, hilariously, is on the internet:
Adolph Hitler once said that to engineer a society you must first engineer its language. Starting with the youth, he set in motion a design to erode the power of words, to steal the significance and beauty of a single word.
We can see the unfolding of that plan in our society. Society’s ” sexual liberation” has unleashed an entirely new lexicon. For example, “gay” has always meant joyful and gleeful. Yet, today, when we say that Ellen is gay, we’re certainly not talking about her emotional well being.
[…]When a married person uses pornography, or is unfaithful, it compromises not just his (or her) purity, but also compromises the spouse’s purity. As a church, we need to teach a higher standard than abstinence. We need to preach a righteous lifestyle.
Gays are like Hitler, you see, because Ellen DeGeneres likes girls and calls herself “gay.”
And then, she talked about masturbation on MTV:
The Delaware Republican, who is challenging Rep. Mike Castle in the state’s Senate primary and has earned the financial backing of a portion of the Tea Party movement, made an appearance in the MTV series “Sex In The 90s.” Entitled “The Safest Sex Of All,” the episode was ostensibly geared towards understanding the importance of abstinence. But O’Donnell’s guidance went a bit further. Masturbation, she argued, is not a moral substitute for sex. “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.”
“The reason that you don’t tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue,” she extrapolated. “You’re just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun.”
Pun pardoned! Of course, masturbation has many health benefits, and is a completely natural thing to do in private, but fundamentalists don’t believe people have a Constitutional right to privacy anyhow.
Talking Points Memo also highlights the fact that O’Donnell’s campaign seems to be engaging in gay-baiting against her opponent, Mike Castle:
She insists, however, that she had nothing to do with former campaign organization aide Yates Walker, who questioned her rival Rep. Mike Castle’s (R) sexuality in this video, and accused Team Castle of “mudslinging” in a statement on Friday. Walker is a former staffer from Doug Hoffman’s ill-fated campaign in New York’s 23rd Congressional district.
But, as WDEL Radio’s Allan Loudell wrote last week, O’Donnell repeated the innuendo “several times” when saying she doesn’t support what Walker said.
Loudell caught another dog whistle in the opening line of an O’Donnell press release:
Last night, Christine made the following statement to a crowd of over 200 supporters in response to the NEWS JOURNAL’s comments that Castle is gay.
Classy. Teabaggers always talk about how they “want their country back,” but it’s never really clear what country they want back. For Christine O’Donnell, it seems to be the United States of No Gays or Pocket Pool.
For his part, Tbogg wonders how O’Donnell’s platforms will play with Delaware’s “play-with-yourself” base. One thing’s for sure: Mike Castle needs to get a grasp [har har] on the situation before things get out of hand [snicker].
