A married Michigan state lawmaker who made national headlines last week for creating a fake gay sex scandal to drive attention away from his affair with a female colleague refuses to resign, apologizes to God, claims the Lansing “mafia” was blackmailing him.
If you thought the Todd Courser fake gay sex scandal story couldn’t get any stranger, it can, and it just did.
Rep. Courser is the anti-gay Michigan freshman Tea Party state lawmaker who tried to get his top aide to send an email blast to his fellow Republicans that claimed he had been caught having sex with a male prostitute behind a Lansing nightclub.
Why?
To divert attention away from his real sex scandal.
Courser is married to a woman and has four children. He is (or was) having an affair with another state lawmaker, Rep. Cindy Gamrat, who is married to a man and has three children.Â
Courser’s aide secretly taped him asking to take a day off from work and send through a fake email account the provocative email slandering Courser, which Courser had written. The aide, Ben Graham, refused, and was shortly thereafter fired.
Now, in a nearly half-hour audio recording, Courser claims he concocted the gay sex scandal not to hide his affair, but to smoke out his blackmailers.
Yes, now the state lawmaker is claiming he was being blackmailed by an anonymous person texting him.
Rather than obey his oath to the Michigan Constitution and report the alleged blackmailing, Courser is blaming Graham and two other former staffers for colluding with the Lansing “mafia,” as the Detroit Free Press reports.
“The e-mail was put in motion to disrupt the blackmailer and give me some clues as to the surveillance of my life. It was all done in a pressure cooker and … it put me in a situation where a bad choice was the choice that I made,” he said.
And Courser is refusing to resign, because he has now vowed to stand up to the corrupt forces that are trying to bring him down.
In his audio statement, Courser says, “to change the country, men and women must be able to stand unafraid even when they’re a broken messenger. And I’m a certainly a broken messenger.”
“I have chosen to stay and make them play their hand. I think it is absolutely necessary to have these clandestine operations to control public officials be exposed. So I have refused to leave quietly and have decided that these efforts really need to come out.”
“I see this as the establishment machine getting everyone to do what they’re told to do and no one dare question their authority,” Courser explains. “I will attempt to continue to resolve this issue and find out who the person is, but without police involvement and willingness to track the person do, it’s nearly impossible to do so.”
Of course, Courser could actually go to the police – and the FBI, since blackmail is a federal offense – for assistance, but he is refusing to take that route, or to resign.
“I could have resigned, this is really the option that the anonymous texter wanted and done so quietly. But that would have allowed my personal issues to rule the day,” he said. “I essentially would have submitted to the authority of the establishment machine and in doing so to protect myself and my family. And most of you would say this is the right decision. But I really thought that this would allow them to win.”
Courser and Gamrat have both used their Christian faith as political tools, and advocated against same-sex marriage and abortion. Courser called the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision “an absolute tragedy for our nation and its future,” “a decision that will embolden and expand the tyrannical hammer of the secular progressive left,” and a “crushing day for those who believe in traditional marriage and traditional morality.”
Courser also says in his audio statement that he has asked for forgiveness from God.
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