IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, television and I were both very young.  Even 70 years ago, professional wrestling was less a sport than a theatrical performance.  It was a natural fit for television stations hungry for programming.  In those days, the biggest name in wrestling was Gorgeous George, a man who sported dyed blonde hair and wore flamboyant robes.  Bob Hope saw him perform in Los Angeles in 1945 and began making jokes about him on his radio show.  All that free publicity made Gorgeous George one of the most recognizable stars of early television.  He was a comic villain whose motto was “Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.”  I wonder if young Donald Trump admired Gorgeous George.

You’ve probably heard about Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, who’s currently under fire for failing to stop, or even report, sexual harassment when he was an assistant wrestling coach at (the) Ohio State University back in the 90s.  OSU wrestlers were groped by the team doctor (who committed suicide in 2005) and apparently their locker room and shower area were open to the public, drawing voyeurs to their practices.  As of this writing, no fewer than seven former OSU wrestlers have come forward to say that Jordan knew of this abuse and did nothing.  

The GOP has a long tradition of looking the other way (or making excuses) when one of their own is caught up in a sex scandal.  They’ve embraced pussy-grabber Donald Trump and endorsed child molester Roy Moore.  They even elected Dennis Hastert as Speaker of the House from 1999-2007.  Hastert, too, was a midwestern wrestling coach.  He was worse than Jordan; a judge described him as a “serial child molester.”

Jordan is a wingnut favorite, and a candidate to replace Paul Ryan as the leader of House Republicans in 2019, so it’s no surprise that Republican spokesmen have rallied to his defense.  My favorite apologia came from a young woman named Bre Payton, a staff writer for The Federalist.  She said, "I think it's also important not to hold people 20 years ago to the standards of today, right?”

Not so fast there, Ms. Payton.  I sympathize with the argument that it’s not fair to apply contemporary standards of wokeness retroactively, particularly over centuries.  Still, I’m pretty sure that in 1998, people knew that sexual abuse was wrong.

Payton is a proud graduate of Patrick Henry College, class of 2015.  PHC's motto is "For Christ and for Liberty."  They boast of a curriculum based on the principle of Biblical inerrancy.  Instead of making up transparently desperate excuses for the GOP - gropers, oglers, and pedophiles - you'd think Patrick Henry grads would hold a professed Christian like Jim Jordan to the moral standards of the Bible that he and they claim to believe in.