I was of the mind that one of the biggest reveals in the
Texas Observer's piece on misogyny in the Lege was well down in the story, and sure enough the
NCRM beat me to it.
Even the most powerful women in the Legislature experience it. When I
started interviewing women lawmakers, they all—Republican and Democrat,
House and Senate, rural and urban—said that being a woman in the
statehouse is more difficult than being a man. Some told of senators
ogling women on the Senate floor or watching porn on iPads and on
state-owned computers, of legislators hitting on female staffers or
using them to help them meet women, and of hundreds of little comments
in public and private that women had to brush off to go about their day.
Some said they often felt marginalized and not listened to—that the
sexism in the Legislature made their jobs harder and, at times, produced
public policy hostile to women.
Of all of the various actions that can get a person's employment in the private sector terminated, surfing porn at work is pretty much at the top of the list. It doesn't require eyewitness testimony; there's no he said/she said BS, the offender can't say it never happened. When former Houston Metro chairman
George Greanias went to Rentboy.com on his personal laptop late one night at the office, he was nailed for it. As bright a man as he was, he didn't understand the whole VPN login-IT audit trail thing.
All of the bad behavior described in that article is (should be) zero-tolerance, but a state employee or elected official using taxpayer-funded computers, servers, IPs, etc. for their personal sexual titillation ought to be grounds for immediate dismissal. No warnings, no waiting until the next election.
It's at least as serious as
forging timestamps on roll call votes, but then again I don't see Attorney General Greg Abbott investigating that either.
A real good question for religious conservatives to ask the
Three TeaBaggers running to replace Abbott in the AG office: "Do you support or oppose state legislators, staff, etc. using their computers and tablets to look at porn?"
Because at least one of them is bound to oppose it strongly enough to be willing to make an example of someone.
Update: A solid take on how to fix these problems from
nonsequiteuse.
