We still don’t know what Ken Paxton did, but his opponent(s?) in the upcoming primary seem poised to help us out. John Cornyn, the sitting Republican Senator Ken is trying to unseat, has begun running ads making fun of “Dave P.,” (the unimaginative fake name on an Uber account Paxton used during a long running affair). Other Texas Republicans clearly smell blood and are considering jumping into the race. Representatives Wesley Hunt and Ronny Jackson are rumored to be potential candidates in the primary. Hunt hasn’t announced anything, but he posted a picture of his wholesome family (a wife and three young children) the morning after Angela Paxton field for divorce as if to say, “Look at me, I haven’t cheated on my wife.” Yet. Ken got right back to work ruining lives, especially those of trans people. Last week he sued U.S. Masters Swimming for allowing transgender athletes to race in a competition held this past April in San Antonio. He claims this constitutes a “misleading” business practice and violates the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Despite its name, U.S. Masters Swimming is not a government entity or the official anything of the United States. It’s a nonprofit, membership group that has several clubs across the country. Some of its adult members like to swim competitively. They’re not the ones complaining, and no one is forcing Paxton or anyone else into the pool with them (though I bet Paxton would be a popular dunk tank attraction). I’d say this was Paxton trying to deflect attention from the divorce and the implied allegations of adultery (a la Trump’s don’t-look-at-the-pedophile-file strategy), but he started this investigation in the Spring before his wife called a Biblical Marriage Foul on him. Still, he could just leave these people alone and let them swim the 200-meter fly in peace. Not surprisingly, we have some other misbehaving Republican lawmakers to discuss this week as well. For all their talk of family values, the dangers of porn, and the sin of abortion, a heck of a lot of them just can’t keep it in their pants. See below for the latest installments of “It’s Always the Ones You Most Expect.” These stories have it all: exotic dancers, public displays of porn, and subsidized abortion. Oh my. Before we get there, however, I wanted to let you know that it’s vacation time for me. Yay. I’m going stick my feet in the sand, look up at stars, and temporarily try to forget that everything is so f**ked up. I do not predict success, but I do predict some beautiful scenery, time with friends, and a lot of lobster. I will settle for that. See you at the end of August. Trump Administration Torches Contraception (Literally)Usually when we talk about the assault on contraception from the Trump Administration and Project 2025 it’s somewhat metaphorical. It’s typically about disinformation campaigns, funding cancellation, and fears that the Comstock laws will be revived. This time, however, we’re talking about a literal assault on contraception. There’s fire involved. The State Department has confirmed that it plans to incinerate $9.7 million dollars’ worth of contraceptive implants, pills, and IUDs. These birth control methods were originally set to be distributed to women around the world by USAID, but one of the Administration’s first outrageous acts was to shutter that agency. (It’s impossible to keep up with the mass firings, urgent rehirings, and desperate legal attempts to rescue various government agencies, because the chaos is the point, but the most recent accounts suggest that USAID has been subsumed into the State Department. While it still exists, 86% of its contracts have been cancelled.)
The contraception in question has been in limbo in a storage facility in Belgium for months while the United Nations, a number of NGOs, and the governments of Belgium and France (where it’s gonna be burned at the stake) have tried to work out a deal with the U.S. Government to distribute rather than destroy these methods. Our government is refusing for ideological—and inaccurate—reasons. It’s not about products: The contraception is still in good shape and none of it expires before 2027. It’s not about the money (though it might be about greed): Both UNFPA (the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency) and MSI Reproductive Choices (an NGO) have offered to buy the products back from the U.S. government. MSI Reproductive Choices was told that the government would only take full market value for the supplies, which is absurd because they paid nothing near that to procure them. (Without insurance, one IUD in the U.S. can cost as much as $1,800.) Moreover, destroying the contraceptives is estimated to cost $167,000 in part because they will have to use a special incineration procedure to make sure the process doesn’t release too many hormones into the air. It's not about the label: The State Department has said that they don’t want any branded USAID merch in the field anymore, but that isn’t the issue because both UNFPA and MSI offered to repackage the contraception to remove USAID’s name and logo before distributing it. It’s about abortion, stupid: As always, it goes back to the Administration’s hard line on abortion. One lame reason the State Department has given for not wanting these materials distributed is the Mexico City Policy. Originally implemented by the Reagan Administration in 1984 and then cancelled and revived with every leadership change, the Mexico City Policy (also called the Global Gag Rule) says that U.S. foreign aid can’t go to organizations that “perform or promote” abortion, even if the aid isn’t being used for that purpose. The feds have said that if they give these unused contraceptives to UNFPA or an NGO, they won’t know what organizations are ultimately receiving it and, therefore, wouldn’t know where to put the gag. This is true. But if those other entities have purchased the contraception and rebranded it, it no longer falls under any U.S. policies. So why do they still care? It’s about abortion, stupid. These idiots are still pretending that contraception causes abortion. According to CNN, a state department spokesperson referred to the products as “certain abortifacient birth control commodities from terminated Biden-era USAID contracts.” That’s not how it f**king works. We’ve been over this so many times. (See Hey Ted Cruz, That’s Not How It F**king Works or Nick Cannon Condoms and Mifepristone.) We don’t have to do it again today. Suffice it to say: birth control works before someone is pregnant; abortifacients work after. There is no such thing as an abortifacient birth control. What we have now, however, are twelve truckloads of pills, injections, IUDs, and implants that could prevent pregnancy (and therefore abortion!) but will instead be driven to France and set aflame just to spite everyone with a uterus. It’s Always the Ones You Most Expect (Part 243)Okay, I’ve only used this headline once before, but this could easily be episode 243. Think of all the stories we’ve heard over the years about the pastor who preaches family values getting caught paying for sex, the lawmaker who proposes anti-porn legislation whose hard drive is full of hardcore stuff, or the anti-LGBTQ politician literally caught with his pants down in a gay nightclub. This week’s entries include the Bible-buying Superintendent who had porn playing in his office and the anti-abortion politician who slept with an exotic dancer and may have paid for an abortion or two in his lifetime. We’ll start with Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters who is committed to bringing more religion into the schools. He promised that by the start of the 2025-26 school year there would be a bible in every classroom and asked the state legislature for $3 million dollars to make that happen. They scoffed at him. Then 32 families, with the assistance of the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and other organizations, sued him for obvious reasons. While that case is still in process, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a temporary stay preventing Walters from spending his agency’s money on bibles. Don’t worry though, he somehow managed to secure 532 Trump-branded Bibles for less than $25,000. (At just $46.99 each that’s $13 less than they retail for and more than twice what a non-branded bible seems to go for on Amazon.) Walters also made headlines earlier this year when he rewrote the state’s social studies standards to include references to the “stolen” 2020 election. This change was made at the last minute and was not included in the draft put up for public comment. In fact, some school board members said they didn’t see it until the vote. Given these priorities, it should surprise no one that Oklahoma placed 50th in education rankings released last week. To cut Ryan some slack, the list included 50 states plus DC, so that’s not actually dead last. What did come as a surprise this week was the nudie pic showing on Walters’s television during an executive session of the school board last Thursday. Board Member Becky Carson told the Oklahoman that it took her a few minutes to realize she was looking at naked ladies:
Apparently only Carson and one other board member, Ryan Deatherage, were seated in positions where they could see the screen, but fellow board member Chris Van Denhende confirmed the rest of what happened in the room saying, "Based on Superintendent Walters’s reaction when Becky called it to his attention, something was being viewed that was not supposed to be on that TV." Walters disagrees. He says the allegations are categorically false and that the situation is being drummed up by board members who are “blatantly dishonest and cannot hide their political agenda.” (Carson, Deatherage, and Van Denhende were all appointed this year by Oklahoma’s Republican Governor.) We can talk about why Becky was so shook by seeing naked women later, but right now let’s discuss Walters suggesting that he has no knowledge of what was on the TV. If someone across from you is horrified by what they’re seeing on the TV behind you—whether it’s porn, a serial killer, or a house fire—isn’t it human instinct to look? Are we to believe he really didn’t turn around? Why deny it? This isn’t a case of being caught with his pants down or his hands in them. It isn’t even an open tab on his computer. Wouldn’t he be better off acting as horrified as Becky, apologizing profusely, reminding everyone that a lot of people have access to the remote, promising to get to the bottom of it, and then firing an intern or two? His denial is not being blindly accepted by fellow Republicans. Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton and state Sen. Adam Pugh, both Republicans, said in a joint news release Friday that there would be an investigation: “This is a bizarre and troubling situation that raises serious questions about the events and what took place…[and] paints a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency." I definitely feel unsettled. Do you? It’s Always the Ones You Most Expect (Part 244)We have another entry into the ledger, and this one—if true—is more egregious. On Friday, online outlet Current Revolt shared an article and a 25-minutes video interview with Alex Grace, a former exotic dancer and mother of four who says she had a long-term affair with Texas Representative Giovanni Capriglione. Her most shocking allegation is that the Republican lawmaker has “funded several abortions for his own personal gain.” Capriglione is… wait for it… the author of Texas’s trigger law which is one of the strictest abortion laws in the country. The law makes performing an abortion, at any time from the moment of fertilization, punishable with life imprisonment or a civil penalty of $100,000. We know by now that this law has made Texas one of the most dangerous places to be pregnant as women have been forced to wait for lifesaving procedures because doctors are scared to act quickly. In what could be another stunning bit of hypocrisy, Capriglione has also backed laws that would make it a civil offense to pay for someone to receive an abortion. Grace has given few details about the abortion allegations, saying that we’ll just have to take her word for it. She did give details of their relationship which started in 2004 when she was 18 and working as an exotic dancer and seems to have ended relatively recently (she said it lasted almost two decades). Capriglione was elected in 2012. Grace describes him as “magnetizing” and credits him with encouraging her and helping her succeed, but she also shared some less than flattering details of the relationship. She says they communicated with burner phones and met in his office, at hotels, and once at his home when his wife and kids were away. She also relays a gross anecdote about him telling her he wanted to ejaculate into the cookie batter that was going to be used for his daughter’s bake sale. In her TikTok retelling, Grace says he referred to his jizz as “baby gravy.” Eww. Following the GOP Oops-I-Got-Caught Playbook, Capriglione is blaming the “Austin elites” for this story. He said in a statement:
While he categorically denied paying for abortions, he does admit that he had an affair saying:
Interestingly, he never says whether the affair he is copping to was with Alex Grace. There is definitely a he said/she said aspect to all of this, and it’s not yet clear how much corroborating evidence there is or whether other women will come forward. (Grace does not seem to have explicitly said that he paid for her abortion(s), so it’s possible this is someone else’s story to tell.) Still, the guilt meter is not looking good for the lawmaker. First, it’s worth nothing that Current Revolt is described by many as a far right outlet (like us, it’s a Substack). More telling, Capriglione has already announced that he won’t run again despite having kicked off his reelection campaign a month ago and bragging that he had the support of both Governor Abbott and President Trump. We already know that he once left money for her under a rubber mat behind the Chuck E. Cheese, so what else is afraid will leak? (Oh, please let it be butt stuff.) I’m sure parts 245 and 246 will come out soon with a new batch of elected officials showing us that when it comes to sex, we must do what they say and (please, please, please) ignore what they do. I’m betting if we dug deep into their psyches and childhood trauma, we could find the personal demons that drive them to both outlaw and participate in certain behaviors, but we shouldn’t have to suffer because they never went to therapy. It’s time for these Republican men to get over guilt and shame about sex so we can enjoy our sex lives (preferably not with these Republican men). Sex on Wednesday is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Sex on Wednesday that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Trump Administration Torches Contraception
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