Story here; an excerpt:
Mayor James E. West of Spokane, a Republican opponent of gay rights, was accused in a newspaper on Thursday of molesting two boys decades ago and the paper also says it caught him using the trappings of his office to try to court a young man online.
Mr. West denied the accusations, but acknowledged he "had relations with adult men."
He admitted offering autographed sports memorabilia and a possible City Hall internship to what he thought was an 18-year-old man on the Web site Gay.com. The man was actually a computer expert hired by the newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, as part of a sting operation.
Mr. West, 54, a former Boy Scout leader and Army paratrooper who was married for five years in the 1990's, denied that the online offers constituted abuse of his office, and he said he would serve out the more than three years remaining in his term....
Mr. West, a conservative, rose to become majority leader of the State Senate during a two-decade legislative career. He consistently opposed efforts to expand civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, a ban on same-sex marriage, in 1998.
The newspaper had hired a computer expert to create a fictitious identity as an 18-year-old boy to chat with Mr. West, whose online aliases included "RightBi-Guy."
UPDATE: More commentary and information here:
The West scandal fits a pattern.
As PBS' "Frontline" recently had courage to report, closeted homosexuals help design conservatives' media and political campaigns against such causes as same-sex marriage.
It has been a quarter-century since Washington, D.C., police charged Maryland Rep. Robert Bauman with propositioning a 17-year-old male. Bauman was an original sponsor of an anti-gay bill called the Family Protection Act.
As Karen Dorn Steele reported yesterday in The Spokesman-Review, West championed criminal background checks for jobs involving children, warning that abusers "often try to gain a position of trust and authority."
West proposed making it a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers 18 or younger to have sexual contact.
He co-sponsored a bill to bar gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day care centers and some agencies: It provided for screening prospective employees on their sexual orientation.
Recent Comments