October 05, 2017 02:42 PM UTC

At Least He's Not Your Soon-To-Be Ex-Congressman

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• by: Colorado Pols

Politico reporting on the fate of GOP Rep. Tim Murphy, up until very recently one of the U.S. House of Representatives’ most vocal on the matter of restricting access to abortion–who apparently didn’t want to practice what he preaches when his own girlfriend got knocked up:

Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), the embattled anti-abortion lawmaker who allegedly encouraged his lover to terminate a pregnancy, on Thursday announced his plan to resign from office later this month — just 24 hours after announcing his plan to retire after 2018…

The Pennsylvania Republican’s about-face came after House GOP leaders and senior Republicans upped the pressure on Murphy to step down. GOP sources familiar with Murphy’s thinking said the married man initially believed he could weather the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story revealing he had encouraged an abortion in texts he sent to his girlfriend, a psychologist half his age.

From that story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in which Rep. Murphy makes it painfully evident that there is a wide gap between his public and private views on abortion:

“And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,” Shannon Edwards, a forensic psychologist in Pittsburgh with whom the congressman admitted last month to having a relationship, wrote to Mr. Murphy on Jan. 25, in the midst of an unfounded pregnancy scare…

A text from Mr. Murphy’s cell phone number that same day in response says, “I get what you say about my March for life messages. I’ve never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don’t write any more. I will.”

Presumably so Murphy could thread the needle (no pun intended) a little better in his stridently anti-abortion public message! As always, and we say so every time the allegedly pious let their floppy bits do the thinking for them, we don’t have problem with people who, for whatever reason, have an extramarital affair. That’s their business. We’re not so comfortable with the idea of men pressuring women to have abortions, since in either case it should be up to the woman to make that choice.

But above all, don’t be a total damn hypocrite. That’s when it’s time to clock out and go home.