I have to admit, I had forgotten about Dennis Hastert. In fact, if you’d told me he’d already been dead for years, I would have accepted that without question. Or mourning.
The former Republican speaker of the House died Oct. 3 at his home in Plano, Illinois. He was 84.
What can I say? It’s really hard to keep track of the many elected officials who turn out to be total creeps.
Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve watched the Republican Party become the party of creeps. It didn’t start with Trump. There’s no specific moment in time to point to, but creepiness really started to ramp up with Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was the first president to really ingratiate himself with right-wing Christian conservatives, inviting them to be part of his governing coalition. The 1980s were a wild time when being “morally righteous” meant opposing abortion, fighting to tack up the Ten Commandments in public classrooms and supporting “trickle-down economics,” the idea that as the rich get richer the poor will somehow benefit. It is still the Republican approach to the economy, and it has only exacerbated the extreme wealth inequality in the U.S.
Hitching the religious right to the Republican Party has continued to allow Republicans to frame their political priorities as morally just even as those policies are based on bigotry and cause suffering. It has also allowed Republican political figures to get away with breathtaking hypocrisy.
So, yeah. Dennis Hastert. He was speaker of the House from 1999 until 2007, a time of Republican dominance in Congress and, starting in 2001, the presidency of George W. Bush. And Republicans were fighting hard against LGBTQ+ equality, especially civil rights protections and marriage equality.
Hastert was on the front lines of this fight.
Many conservatives claimed — and still claim — that fighting against LGBTQ+ people is necessary to protect children. They lean on the lie that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators and thus don’t deserve any kind of protection, certainly not marriage rights.
Hastert was particularly focused on protecting children from pedophiles, which for many religious right folks was synonymous with “homosexuals.”
In hindsight, that crusade seems inspired by a guilty conscience.
In 2015, Hastert pleaded guilty to illegally structuring bank withdrawals in a scheme to pay hush money to cover up sexual abuse he committed against high school boys while he was their wrestling coach.
“Hastert sexually abused at least four team members from 1965 to 1981,” The Guardian reported. “The person Hastert was paying, identified in court papers only as Individual A, said the abuse occurred in a motel room when he was 14 on the way home from wrestling camp.”
Prosecutors also said Hastert sexually abused two other boys during locker room massages and would sit in a recliner positioned in direct view of the shower stalls while the boys showered.
These are heinous acts, truly serious crimes against children. U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin called Hastert a “serial child molester” and sentenced him to 15 months in prison for the banking violation. The statute of limitations on the abuse had long since passed, so he was never charged with it.
Did Hastert’s downfall cause Republicans to change course? Do any self-reflection? Say to themselves, “Hey, maybe if we care so much about protecting children from harm, we should focus our efforts on people who are actually committing child sexual abuse?”
No, of course not. Just as they were during Hastert’s reign, Republicans are much more concerned about serving themselves politically by painting gay and trans people as predators than they are about actually protecting children.
If anyone thought that might change with the release of the Epstein files, well, nice thought.
Surely I am not the only person who remembers that part of what got Trump elected was a right-wing conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor? And that God sent Trump to the White House to save the children?
We were told that once the Epstein files were released, the truth would come out and vengeance would strike. But when the files revealed uncomfortable information, such as the names of powerful men, including Trump, things kind of just fizzled out.
After all, this is the United States of America. We aren’t wild about holding powerful men accountable. For anything.
Though I usually don’t have anything nice to say about The Detroit News, I must give credit where credit is due for its very direct headline, “Dennis Hastert, former House speaker and child molester, dies at 84.”
Good riddance.
