Dennis Hastert, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, was released from Federal prison today–July 18.

He had served 13 months of a 15-month sentence.

Hastert was the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2007. He had been indicted on May 28, 2015, for violating federal banking laws and lying to the FBI.

He had tried to conceal $3.5 million he had paid since 2010 to a man he had molested as a high school student.

The student had been on the wrestling team that Hastert had coached as a teacher at Yorkville High School in Yorkfille, Ill.

“I felt a special bond with our wrestlers,” Hastert wrote in his 2004 memoirs, Speaker: Lessons From Forty Years of Coaching and Politics. “And I think they felt one with me.”

Apparently that “special bond” extended to activities outside the ring. In the pre-sentence  report, Justice Department prosecutors charged that Hastert had abused four young boys when he was their wrestling coach. One was only 14 years old.  

Hastert had claimed that a coach should never strip away another person’s dignity. But, said federal prosecutors, “that is exactly what defendant did to his victims. He made them feel alone, ashamed, guilty, and devoid of dignity.”

Later, in 1981, Hastert entered Congress.

Dennis Hastert

Hastert was not indicted for having had a sexual relationship with an underage student. The statute of limitations had long ago run out on that offense.

He was indicted for trying to evade federal banking laws and lying to the FBI.

The Bureau had wanted to know if Hastert was using the cash for criminal purposes or if he was the victim of a criminal extortion.

And Hastert had claimed he was storing cash because he didn’t feel safe with the banking system: “Yeah, I kept the cash. That’s what I’m doing.”

J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building

On October 28, 2015, Hastert pleaded guilty to structuring money transactions in a way to avoid requirements to report where the money was going.  

Although he escaped going to prison as a child molester, he did not escape the stigma of being labeled one.

“The defendant is a serial child molester,” pronounced Judge Thomas M. Durkin at Hastert’s sentencing. “Some actions can obliterate a lifetime of good works. Nothing is more stunning than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘Speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.”

During his tenure as Speaker of the House, Hastert had waged all-out war on homosexual rights. This included:

• Pushing the anti-homosexual Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) through the House. This “forbids requiring any state or any other political subdivision of the United States to credit as a marriage a same-sex relationship treated as marriage in another state or equivalent government.”
• Proposing a Constitutional amendment to “establish that marriage shall consist of one man and one woman.”
• Voting against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which banned companies from discriminating against employees “on the basis of sexual orientation.”

Owing to Hastert’s “deeply conservative” voting record, in 1998, he received perfect scores of 100 from

• The National Rifle Association;
• The Christian Coalition;
• The National Right to Life Committee; and
• The Chamber of Commerce.
  

Hastert, who concealed his past as a sexual predator while claiming to be a man of virtue, wrote in his autobiography: “I was never a very good liar. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough. I could never get away with it, so I made up my mind as a kid to tell the truth and pay the consequences.”

It would take decades before the revealing of the truth forced him to pay the consequences.

Hastert makes the third Republican “family values” Speaker of the House to become ensnared in an ethics scandal.

• Newt Gingrich was the first Speaker (1985-1999) in the history of the House to be reprimanded and punished for ethics violations. His offense: Claiming tax-exempt status for a college course run for political purposes.
• His successor, Bob Livingston, a supposedly happily married man and Gingrich’s presumed successor, was forced to resign when Hustler publisher Larry Flynt revealed his sexual infidelities. He had self-righteously demanded that President Bill Clinton, who had had an extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, resign his office.
• Dennis Hastert’s conduct involved neither money nor women—but a series of male high school students.

Of course, Democrats have had their sex scandals as well. But Democrats usually don’t suffer as badly from them.

The reason: Republicans portray themselves as moral examples for the nation. So for them, being caught literally with their pants down proves a double-whammy.

They are condemned for their specific illegal/immoral acts—and for the sheer hypocrisy of their false claims of sainthood.

Ironically, Right-wingers like Hastert would fare better when caught in homosexual or extramarital affairs if they simply admitted their sexual tastes and registered as Democrats.

But in heavily Right-wing states like Texas and Oklahoma, they wouldn’t stand a chance of being elected as a Democrat. And Red-state voters, feeling themselves moral arbiters of the nation, wouldn’t elect anyone they thought was “unnatural.”

So Right-wingers will continue pretending to be moral paragons—and will continue paying the price when they’re exposed as fallible humans.