It’s difficult not to get the sense, sometimes, when going up against Religious Right activists, that their beef is less with the gay community, but much more about their own personal demons. Such may be the case with Linda Wall, a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. If the name “Linda Wall” sounds familiar, it’s because she has shown up in pieces we’ve written in the past on the escaped child kidnapper Lisa Miller, a close friend of Linda’s. While we don’t know whether or not Wall was involved in Miller’s escape — the time she compared herself to Harriet Tubman in her “fight for the children” raised my eyebrows a bit — it’s safe to say that she’s extremely anti-gay and has little understanding of or respect for the law. So of course, we are not surprised to find out that back in the 1970’s, when she was a physical education teacher, she carried on a relationship with one of her junior high students:
A conservative independent seeking a House of Delegates seat from Appomattox says when she was a junior high teacher 40 years ago she had an affair with a female student but that she was a “different person” back then.
In an Associated Press interview on Wednesday, Linda Wall confirmed her sworn 2006 testimony in a lawsuit in which she admitted to “sexual relations with a minor” in the early 1970s when she taught physical education in Prince George County. The 61-year-old Wall said the affair was a long-ago, youthful mistake, not who she is now.
“I’ve never tried to hide that I was in homosexuality. If anybody Googles me, they would find that out there,” Wall said.
OH, Linda, back the hell up. This has nothing to do with you being “in homosexuality,” as it is a known fact that gays are no more likely to molest children than straight people are. So please do not think readers are so ignorant as to let you say, “oh well, I was gay then, but now I’m redeemed!”
The woman admits that she molested a female junior high student. At some point on her alleged path to healing and redemption, she was fed and adopted wholeheartedly the lie that her lesbianism was to blame for her molesting a female junior high student. I am quite sorry, but in the real world, that is not the excuse. Neither is this:
“Forty years ago I was a different person. I was a heavy pot smoker with … impaired judgment and made some bad choices,” she said. “You do that out of college sometimes. Some people do, some people don’t.”
“Oh, I was a stoner back then! Sometimes people get out of college and diddle little girls. Some people do, some people don’t.”
No.
Far from seeking elected office, Linda Wall needs to be seeking professional help, from REAL professionals, rather than the fundamentalist charlatan types who have convinced her that lesbianism and the demon weed are to blame for her molestation of a junior high student.
The politician who released the deposition where Linda admitted all of this, Paul Jost, had this to say:
“I did it because it shows Linda Wall is not fit to hold public office,” said Jost, who moved to Florida several years ago but retains business interests in Hampton Roads.
“To me, this isn’t about her sexuality. People have different feelings about that. To me, this is about a criminal act and that’s why I felt that it needed to be disclosed,” he said, denying that he acted to settle an old score.
Indeed. And I will say again what I said above, a little more strongly: it seems that, when dealing with staunchly anti-gay activists, it might be wise to assume from the outset that their public bigotry is somehow related to battles with their own private demons.
