The story of TimMurphy: Sex, sanctimony, Congress
Our topic for today is hypocrisy. The scene is — where else? — Congress.
This week the House of Representatives voted 237189 to make it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman who has been pregnant more than 20 weeks. Victory for the anti-choice forces. One of whom was apparently very interested in maintaining all options when he thought his own girlfriend was expecting.
Meet Tim Murphy, a Republican congressman from the Pittsburgh suburbs who has a doctorate in psychology and is the co-author of a couple of books with titles like “Overcoming Passive-Aggression.” He’s married but — prodded by information revealed at his lover’s divorce trial — he admits having strayed with another psychologist.
Murphy is a co-sponsor of the anti-abortion bill. At about the same time it was passing, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a note his mistress had texted in January, complaining about the way he kept putting pro-life messages on his Facebook page “when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week. ...”
The girlfriend’s pregnancy was a false alarm. But the Post-Gazette texts showed him apologizing to her about the anti-abortion Facebook posts. He then denied having written them and blamed everything on “staff.”
Murphy is not one of those genial lawmakers whose affable demeanor makes him popular with his peers. Or even with his own office. The Post-Gazette also came up with a memo, apparently written by his chief of staff, complaining about constant turnover due to his “hostile, erratic, unstable, angry, aggressive and abusive behavior.”
There was also a reference to an evening in which Murphy drove some of his staff members to an event in the pouring rain. His “dangerous and erratic” performance behind the wheel was possibly due to the fact that, according to the memo, he was also reading his iPad, playing YouTube videos and texting.
Have I mentioned that Murphy is also the only practicing psychologist in Congress? True fact.
So let’s get back to the anti-abortion bill that Murphy was so shamelessly supporting. The sparse information available suggests that women who choose to have them often delay making a decision because they’re young, short on money and short on education.
If so, the most effective way to fight against lateterm abortions would obviously be programs like teen pregnancy prevention. And making it easy for low-income women to afford contraceptives. And providing easy access to clinics like Planned Parenthood that offer both health services and counseling on effective birth control.
We hardly need to point out that these are all things the Trump administration is trying to defund. When former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price wasn’t busy flying around in private planes, he was waging war on federal services that are targeted at stopping unwanted pregnancies.
“I don’t know anything else to call that but pure hypocrisy: We love it until it is born, and then it is somebody else’s problem,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York, who was leading the Democratic opposition to the anti-abortion bill.
So that’s our story. The moral is to beware of aggrieved, texting girlfriends. And politicians who want to be called prolife without having to pay for it.