Kristin Maguire
This week BuzzFlash is pleased to bring you the classic tale of Republican sexual hypocrisy, but with a modern twist only the Internet could provide. The pervasiveness of perverseness within sexually-repressed cultures creates some interesting narratives, and the GOP is no exception. But throw in that "series of tubes" we call the Internet, and the dramatic possibilities are nearly endless.
Kristin Maguire is perhaps the best person to unfold that drama. A fundamentalist Christian mother, Maguire is also a
friend and political ally to another recent winner of our illustrious GOP Hypocrite Award, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
Maguire's position put her in contact with her inner hypocrite on a daily basis. As chair of the South Carolina Board of Education since January (though she's served as a member on the board for nine years) she "has personally demonstrated no confidence in or support of public education," according to a local op-ed. She homeschools her own kids and doggedly pursued avenues of undermining and discrediting education through de-funding efforts, voucher programs and advocating for abstinence-only and creationism programs in public schools.
But where there's smoke, there's fire, and Maguire's true passions reportedly lie in the porn industry. The now-resigned Board of Ed chairwoman allegedly wrote erotic fiction published online under the nom de plume Bridget Keeney, according to the Web site FITSNews.com.
While the claim hasn't been independently verified, Maguire announced her resignation from the board -- to spend more time with her family, of course -- shortly after the article was published. The pile-up of evidence listed at FITS News is damning (only if you believe that kind of stuff will send you to hell, which we presume Maguire does), if true:
FITS was able to use conversations in various Internet chat rooms, however, to link at least two "erotic stories" to Maguire's alleged pen name, "Bridget Keeney." From there, numerous similarities between "Bridget" and Maguire emerged, including commonalities in age, geographic location, engineering background, hobbies (knitting, for example) and number of children. One comment left in an erotic chat room by "Bridget" even reveals the name of a professor who was at Clemson University's College of Engineering at the time when Maguire was a student there, while another comment references a specific medical procedure that Maguire underwent several years ago.
Confronted with these numerous identifying markers, Maguire spoke to FITS of difficult times in her life and acknowledged that she had visited certain websites where such material was posted and reviewed. She did not admit to authoring erotic fiction, however.
The article quotes several unnamed staffers and community members who reported seeing Maguire engage in questionable acts, such as giving a lap dance in a local bar and attempting to seduce a staffer using the desk of Sanford's long-suffering wife, Jenny. The site also says Maguire worked with Sanford's chief of staff to remove the erotica from the web.
In case you're curious, here are some excerpts from the works of Bridget Keeney. Gawker says they're "quite tawdry, trashy and downright raunchy, which means they're great." Steve Huff at Assme.org notes that she was well-regarded by connoisseurs of online erotica and that nothing she did was illegal, just smutty:
Seriously, if Kristin Maguire wanted to write dirty stories online, that was her business. It shouldn't be considered a reflection of her abilities as a parent or her ability to do her job.
Only someone like, um, Kristin Maguire might think such a thing.
(To be fair, at least one Daily Kossack was unimpressed with Keeney's lit. We didn't read the works personally, and furthermore don't consider ourselves expert enough to comment on the worth of Bridget Keeney to the world of erotic lit. We still wonder about one detail, though: With her apparent expert ability to describe sexual situations, her homeschooling class on sex ed must have been either totally engrossing or really uncomfortable).
So maybe Maguire will come clean and find her true calling in online erotica. Sounds like she's pretty good at it. But for now, the local media seems to be giving her a pass and not even mentioning the accusations in reports on her resignation. So maybe she'll get away with it, just like almost all the other conservative sexual hypocrites out there (except the gay ones).
She was certainly in favor of letting her buddy Sanford off the hook. As a member of the state's Republican Party executive committee, she and her colleagues decided not to call for the governor's resignation after he was found to be having an affair abroad.
So, even if by some remarkable twist of fate Kristin Maguire is not pornstress Bridget Keeney, she's still two-faced about public education and marital fidelity, even when it's not her own. And that is why she is BuzzFlash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week.
Remember our motto: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
Catch up with you soon.
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This is Kristin Maguire's first GOP Hypocrite of the Week Award. Welcome to the club. You can see a list of all previous nominees here.
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