Rod Jetton, the former Missouri House Speaker, fired a state lawmaker from his committee chairmanship in 2007 because the lawmaker had changed a bill in order to end a state ban on gay sex — or what Jetton called “deviate sexual intercourse.”
Jetton was charged with felony assault Monday after a girlfriend alleged that he had beaten and choked her during a recent sexual encounter, in which she failed to use a mutually agreed upon “safe word.” The woman also suggested that Jetton may have slipped a date-rape drug into her glass of wine, causing her to lose consciousness. In the wake of the charges, Jetton announced that the political consulting firm he has run since leaving office last year would close its doors.
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In a 2007 op-ed he wrote for the Southeast Missourian newspaper, Jetton explained why he had recently removed Rep. Scott Lipke, a fellow Republican, as chair of the Committee on Crime Prevention and Public Safety. Lipke, he wrote, had sponsored and handled a bill to protect children from sexual predators, which Jetton supported.
But, wrote Jetton:
Lipke chose to use the bill to delete 14 words from our laws in order to repeal the gay sex ban in Missouri.Thanks to that deletion, it is now legal to engage in deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex here in Missouri. This law had been on our books for decades.
As a result, Jetton stripped Lipke of his chairmanship. “It was a tough decision,” Jetton wrote, “but Lipke’s actions left me with no choice.”
Jetton added: “I have fought attempts by liberals to repeal the gay sex ban for years.”