Dustin Smith, a 21-year-old openly gay North Dakota man has outed one of his state’s lawmakers after seeing sexually explicit photos and messages from him on Grindr, a social network for gay and bisexual men.
Smith said he outed Rep. Randy Boehning to expose his “hypocrisy” for the legislator’s vote against a bill that would grant special privileges to gays.
“I just felt like this story had to get out,” Smith said, according to the Washington Post. “A [representative] had voted against a bill for the LGBT community and here he was talking to me on Grindr.”
Smith said when he saw photos of the members of the state House who voted against the LGBT bill, he recognized the face of Boehning, a lawmaker from Fargo, also known as “Top Man!” on Grindr.
According to Smith, Boehning left sexually suggestive messages on the network, as well as a photo of his penis.
Once he made the connection, Smith reportedly contacted a reporter from the Forum in Fargo for the exposé.
The Post reports Boehning is a “staunch conservative:”
He has pushed to allow guns in classrooms and churches and sponsored strict voter identification requirements. He once attacked Democrats over their effort to give poor kids extra milk at school. Twice, he’s voted against expanding legal protections for gays.
Inforum.com indicates Boehning has said he has voted against bills to grant these special protections to gays because he is voting for his constituency in south Fargo, which does not support the measures. Additionally, he said he has problems with the bill’s language, which would protect people who are “perceived” to be gay.
In response to what is being dubbed “Grindr-gate,” Boehning said sending the photo of his private parts and sexualized messages on the network is “what gay guys do on gay sites… It’s a gay chat site. It’s not the first thing you do on that site. That’s what we do, exchange pics on the site.”
Boehning said a Capitol staff member informed him another lawmaker vowed to out him as gay if he continued voting against bills to grant special legal protections to gays. Boehning, however, would not identify who he believes is running the campaign behind the retaliation against him.
“This has been a challenge for me,” he said. “You don’t tell everyone you’re going to vote one way and then switch your vote another way — you don’t have any credibility that way.”
State Rep. Josh Boschee (D), the only openly gay member of the North Dakota legislature, said he had not spoken to Boehning about his vote, but added that lawmakers from both parties told him a gay GOP staffer at the Capitol had warned Boehning “there could be consequences for the hypocrisy of [his] vote.”
Using the language of the black civil rights movement, Smith told the Post he outed Boehning because of his concern for gay rights in a state he refers to as “bigoted.”
“We live in a state that discriminates against gay people,” he said, adding that gays could be denied housing or restaurant service because Boehning and other politicians voted down the anti-discrimination bill. “North Dakota is kind of being left in the dust as far as civil rights are concerned.”
In a recent interview with Breitbart News, Rev. Bill Owens, president of the Coalition of African American Pastors and a black man who marched with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the actual civil rights movement, said, “We didn’t suffer and die for gay marriage. We marched for opportunity, equality, justice, freedom from oppression. We are the true heirs of the civil rights movement.”
“The LGBT community hijacked our movement, a movement they know nothing about,” Owens asserted. “Gays have not had fire hoses or dogs unleashed at them. They have not been hung from trees or denied basic human rights.”
Smith said in high school he witnessed how gays could not come out on their own terms, and somehow believed outing Boehning—not on his own terms—could emphasize the lawmaker’s “hypocrisy.”
“He lives in a state where he represents constituents who don’t agree with his lifestyle,” Smith said. “But he has to lie to them about his lifestyle and his personal beliefs to get elected.”
Smith said he hopes Boehning experiences the same kind of relief after being outed by him that he experienced in high school when he finally came out after his Christian family wanted him to “pray the gay away.”
Who are the real “hypocrites,” however?
In February of 2014, openly gay Libertarian mayoral candidate in Washington, D.C. Bruce Majors was assailed by the district’s Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA) because he espoused limited government and would not support taxpayer funding of the group’s special interest agenda.
Earlier in April, Majors, a real estate agent, wrote at Redstate about the hypocrisy shown by gays and lesbians who have excluded heterosexuals from their businesses and activities yet have grown accustomed to special privileges afforded them by government and a culture that has caved to the belief that gays’s “civil rights” are in jeopardy. Majors wrote:
I won’t be surprised if people in the “traditional marriage” movement, who have lost on the issue of marriage equality, become civil rights Social Justice Warriors, and sue all of these businesses out of existence. And could one blame them? I almost welcome it, just to make the point that if you want to begin outlawing all freedom of association (and freedom of belief) then two can play that game.
As a realtor in Washington, D.C., I have actually had a (very nice) lesbian couple ask me if I could tell them about the gay and lesbian neighbors on a block where they were looking at rowhouses. I’ve had to tell clients like them — usually self-described left-liberal Democrats, frequently employed by political campaigns and lobbying groups — that if they want to look in Virginia, where sexual orientation is not a protected class, I can answer that question; but in D.C., providing any information about anyone’s sexual orientation in a real estate transaction is grounds for me to lose my license.
(The response: “Oh, that law is there to protect me. You can tell me!” So much for equality before the law.)
Real estate developers are just beginning to discuss gay oriented nursing homes and 55+ communities, so let’s nip that in the bud too. (The list is endless – gay oriented health care providers, etc., etc.) Gay-oriented businesses have banned straight people, at least in large or organized groups, before.
Majors agrees the gay “civil rights” paradigm is a “disaster.”
“Originally intended to benefit African Americans, who have a rather unique history in the U.S., the paradigm grinds on, trying to identify new ‘protected classes’ whom its bureaucrats and lobbyists… can make more money and acquire more power protecting by forcing you to share a locker room,” he said.
“We need to scrap the entire civil rights mythology and its priestly class and reformulate all such policies to be based on the ideas of individual self-ownership and all that it entails, including freedom of association,” Majors added.