This is going to be a quickie, since it’s my husband’s birthday and we’re off to do some furniture shopping as well as celebrate. Also, I’m avoiding answering the phone since some of my family members escalated the grieving process to the crying and screaming at each other stage earlier than I expected. I had thought that wouldn’t happen until after the person who just entered hospice care had actually died. But the dying man is a lifelong abuser, so I should have realized he’d drive people to turn on each other at least one more time.

While we’re on the subject of evil, abusive men, let’s talk about one that didn’t raise me…

Hey, so a couple dozen of the people who wrote letters asking for leniency for admitted child molester and former Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, agreed to allow their identities and the contents of the letters made public (which was the condition the judge insisted on before he would look at any of them). That’s a bit less than half the letters the lawyers originally tried to submit under seal: Tom Delay and ex-CIA director among those who ask judge to go easy on Dennis Hastert.

In case you forgot, Hastert has been indicted for illegally trying to conceal millions of dollars in hush money payments to try to keep the public from learning that when Hastert was a High School football coach he molested at least four of the boys under his supervision. Oh, and he’s also been indicated for lying to the FBI about what all the financial shenanigans are about: Dennis Hastert’s secret gay ‘misconduct’ is even worse given his terrible voting record on gay rights and Dennis Hastert Molested At Least Four Young Boys: Prosecutors.

He’s not being charged with the molestation, which drove at least one of the boys to commit suicide, because conveniently there’s a statute of limitations on sexually molesting children: Dennis Hastert Case Renews Debate Over Sex Crime Statute of Limitations. I think Eileen McNamara, a journalism professor at Brandeis University, puts it best in a quote from that last article:

“Why should a rape victim’s access to the courthouse depend on when the crime was committed?” McNamara wrote then. “There is no statute of limitations on murder because no one thinks the passage of time should shield a killer from answering for his crime. Why should perpetrators of the soul-killing act of rape have such a legal escape hatch?”

Why, indeed, do these hypocrites who rail against other people’s sexuality, and use it to deprive queers, women, and others of civil rights, keep being given these escape hatches?