Defenders of Family Values

originally published April 23, 2008

Shortly after Republicans won control of the Legislature in the 2004 general election, Rep. Glenn Richardson met with his GOP colleagues and told them he would stress “common-sense family values” as soon as he became speaker of the House.

“Georgians stand by their protection of the traditional family,” Richardson said at that caucus meeting. “And we stand with them!”

It’s been more than three years since Richardson made that promise to protect the values of “the traditional family,” and we now know a little more about what Republican leaders consider those values to be.

In January of 2007, an ethics complaint was filed against Richardson accusing him of having an “inappropriate relationship” with a lobbyist who had been working the previous session to get a gas pipeline bill adopted on behalf of AGL Resources. While Richardson denounced the motivations of the person who drafted the complaint, he never denied the details contained in that document. Several months after the complaint was publicized, Richardson and his wife filed for a divorce that was handled behind closed doors by a judge who just happened to be Richardson’s former law partner.

During the months that have elapsed since Richardson’s remarks about protecting “traditional family values,” we have also seen an influential Republican senator from North Georgia file for divorce from his wife, the mother of his four young children.

We have seen another Republican senator from a suburban district be accused of firing a pistol in the midst of a domestic dispute that ended in a divorce. She also was ordered by a judge to stay away from her daughter.

We have seen a powerful Republican House member from the eastern part of the state be nabbed by Atlanta police and charged with drunk driving after he allegedly knocked over a utility pole in the wee hours of a weekend morning, when he was a long way removed from his district (that DUI charge is still pending).

We have seen another prominent Republican lawmaker from Middle Georgia, a committee chairman no less, get nailed twice on DUI charges while driving in the Atlanta area. This politico at first tried to dodge the arrests by claiming “legislative immunity,” then ultimately decided not to run for another term in the General Assembly.

The latest controversy surfaced last week with the sensational disclosure that Mike Evans, a Republican who once served in the House and more recently was chairman of the State Transportation Board, had been involved in a personal “relationship” with Gena Abraham, the Department of Transportation commissioner. This was a violation of DOT policy, so Evans resigned from the board.

Abraham was elected commissioner last fall after Gov. Sonny Perdue, another Republican, urged Transportation Board members to pick her. Evans was part of the majority that voted 7-6 to appoint Abraham to the job. Now that Evans has resigned, the Governor said he still wants Abraham to stay on as DOT commissioner. Perdue, needless to say, has his own ethical history to answer for - his personal attorney amended a bill in the Legislature a few years ago to give the governor a special tax exemption worth $100,000 on a real estate deal. Perdue promptly signed the bill into law.

A person who was overly cynical about all this might conclude that the definition of “family values” - at least judging from the incidents involving top Republican leaders - includes graft, public drinking, divorce, gunplay, and a smattering of hypocrisy as well.

“Voters have figured out that the Republicans’ pious rhetoric about the sanctity of marriage and family values is just a cover-up for hanky-panky and greed,” said former Democratic Party chairman Bobby Kahn, the person who filed that ethics complaint against Richardson.

This is not to imply that the other party is blameless. When the Democrats ran state government for all those years, there were many reports of drinking and feuding and general misbehaving as well. Republicans always said they would run things differently if they ever took control of state government away from those immoral Democrats. Now that the GOP is in charge, however, it looks like they’re just as prone to human weakness and temptation as the guys across the aisle.

There are no great lessons to learn here, just the observation that party labels don’t give anyone a monopoly on morality.

Tom Crawford

Tom Crawford is the editor of Capitol Impact’s Georgia Report, an Internet news site at www.gareport.com that covers government and politics in Georgia.