Herschel Walker Scandal Shows Churches are Fronts to Launder Republican Reputations

Will the GOP run Bill Cosby or Ghislaine Maxwell in 2024?

Anti-abortion activists in the Republican Party are uncompromising. They don’t believe in the right to terminate pregnancies in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of mothers. Doctors who perform abortions are targeted as criminals. Apparently, and unbelievably, they have carved out a rare exception for philandering Republican male politicians, who are free to be as pro-choice as Gloria Steinem.

The Daily Beast reported that Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker impregnated a woman he was dating in 2009 and then enthusiastically paid for her abortion. She kept the receipts, the cashed check and a “get well” card signed by Walker that came with his abortion money. This was an explosive revelation, considering Walker’s extreme position on the issue.  

“To say that it is OK for a woman to kill her baby when [God] said ‘Thou shall not kill.’ And I said, you know, I can’t, I can’t square it,” Walker said at a conservative Christian values roundtable in August. “I can’t get around that.”

Well, he did get around it quite easily by cutting a check to an abortion doctor. The woman who blew the whistle on Walker’s hypocrisy said that he fully supported the procedure because it was “not the right time” for him to have a child. This is the essence of the pro-choice position that provides the people intimately involved with a pregnancy, rather than Big Government, the decision on whether to have a child. It’s what Planned Parenthood calls “family planning”.

The Religious Right acted on this new information by quickly abandoning Walker’s campaign. Just kidding. Instead, Walker marched into First Baptist Church of Atlanta and was greeted with a standing ovation. They cheered as if it was 1980 and Walker had just scored a touchdown for the University of Georgia.  

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Ralph Reed, the disgraced former Christian Coalition leader said, adding that he “100 percent” expected evangelical Christians would stick with Walker. The New York Times reports that he argued that the revelations could boost Republican turnout by rallying social conservatives to defend Walker.

The faithful’s fêting of Walker is a bit perplexing. These are the same people who staunchly supported the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. They consider abortion the equivalent of murder. Yet, here they are, wildly applauding what amounted to a contract killer who, in their twisted view, paid an “abortionist” to snuff out the life of a baby.

Is abortion now acceptable if it’s carried out by a member of one’s political team? Are there exceptions for rich, famous and powerful Republicans? Is “do what I say, not what I do” now okay if Republican lawmakers vote the right way? For a party that once derided moral relativism, the GOP has gotten pretty good at it.

The truth challenged Walker has lied about more than abortion. He falsely claimed to have worked in law enforcement. He said that his food-distribution company would donate a percentage of its earnings to charity, but there is no evidence that it’s true. Walker claimed that he graduated from UGA, but the diploma is in his imagination, not hanging on his wall. And, there is also the issue of clandestine kids that periodically pop up, as if he’s the little old woman who lives in a shoe.

Despite the debauched revelations, the Religious Right loves Walker more than ever. This movement has transformed into a sick parody, becoming a refuge for the most reprehensible of reprobates.

These phonies are so compromised that they no longer even bother trying to hide their hypocrisy. They are like hardcore heroin addicts living in smack dens who stop wearing long sleeve shirts to hide their needle tracks. They have dropped all pretenses and proudly trumpet their addiction to power and influence, dispensing with inconvenient pieties that are mere distractions from their political intoxication.

Fittingly, the Religious Right was called out by Herschel’s gay son, Christian Walker, on TikTok: “Family values, people? He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women.”

It wasn’t long ago that Republicans dragged the nation though hell by impeaching President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Their entire campaign to purge Clinton was predicated on the idea that a man who lacks private morality can’t be trusted as a public servant. For example, at the time, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, “Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office."

The right wing’s embrace of Donald Trump was the end of the GOP’s pretense of upholding honor and integrity, not to mention patriotism or decency. However, waxing nostalgic about a mythical past of Republican decency is historical revisionism. Their opportunistic “family values” crusade was always a sham. It was carried out by frauds and perverts such as Speakers Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), Clarence Thomas and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). The newest addition to the Christian morality police, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, announced last week that she and her husband were divorcing. I guess she skipped over that part of the Bible.

When the Moral Majority hijacked the Republican Party, it was only a matter of time before the GOP was corrupted to its core. It’s a party with an empty hole where there should be a soul. Most white Evangelical churches in America are nothing more than a toxic arm of the GOP, offering a patina of shine to cover their moral grime.

The pews are often packed with a panoply of unsavory characters who are trying to escape their own deplorable pasts. As if proclaiming themselves “Born Again” can wipe their miserable slates clean. Imagine trashing your life and reputation to the point you must abandon it and take on a new persona? The only other people to do this are criminals on the lam or former crooks who ratted their way into the witness protection program. When a right wing preacher quotes the Adam and Eve tale on Sundays, something tells me that a disturbingly high number of those in the pews identify with the snake. 

When the mask of morality slips, the cornered fundamentalist seamlessly switches to repent mode. They engage in shamelessly theatrical parodies of people who are genuinely sorry. To the extent they are truly praying, it’s confined to prayers hoping suckers will buy their schtick.

This absolution magic trick always seems to work. Just take the reaction to Walker’s behavior by Georgia Republican state representative Dominic LaRiccia: “If y’all find a perfect candidate that has never had challenges in their life, I want you to bring them to me and let me meet him or her.”  

The Herschel Walker scandal proves that First Baptist Church of Atlanta, and the legions of “conservative” churches that share its political views, have been reduced to centers for laundering the reputations of politically powerful lechers and liars. Well, at least if the offenders are Republicans.

The GOP is a zombie party that stands for zilch and the corrupt evangelical churches that are their base are completely debased. The logical conclusion for such moral and ethical collapse leads directly to Donald Trump and Herschel Walker. Who do they plan to run for office in 2024, Bill Cosby or Ghislaine Maxwell? I’m not even joking. This pathetic party is a bottomless pit and endless moral sewer. Until the Republican Party repents, reinvents or perishes America will be in a constant state of political crisis.