The House Freedom of Adultery Caucus for Future Divorcees: Where the GOP Moral Majority Protects Family Values With Actions, Not Mere Words
One Caucus leader got hammered at parties with other congressmen "having affairs and getting divorces...while hosting a weekly Bible study in the basement of our home," his wife charged this month.
South Carolina Representative Jeff Duncan with his current fiancee Liz Williams, a lobbyist for weapons manufacturers and the tobacco industry, in a photo she posted on Instagram. The self-described “life-long social conservative” praised his “loving wife” of 35 years at his annual Faith & Freedom BBQ last year, and hightailed directly from there “to the home of his paramour in the Washington DC area," his future ex alleged when filing for divorce.
The 118th Congress, which convened on January 3, 2023 and will end on the same day next year, won’t be remembered for its important legislative achievements because it didn’t accomplish much of anything. However, it is likely to be recalled far into the future for the large number of colorful, scandalous extramarital affairs and divorces racked up by the current House of Representatives.
Personally, I don’t generally care what people do in their spare time for recreational purposes, as long as the activities are mutually consented to by all parties involved. I do care, on the other hand, when said people are political officials who brand themselves as societal role models but don’t practice the same lofty standards that they preach, and especially when they are seeking to impose laws on the rest of the country that would punish sinners for doing the same things they claim to abhor in public but enjoy in private.
A few years back at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event in Dallas I met a GOP county official from a Deep Red state who told me, after she’d had a drink or two too many, that it didn’t matter to her at all if people were straight or gay nor did she share her party’s hardline views on social policy. As an example, she confided that her daughter accidentally got pregnant during a relationship with a horrible man and she urgently counseled her to get an abortion, and helped her find the doctor who performed it.
Before sharing the story, though, she insisted it had to be off the record because if she revealed it publicly she would be denounced as a heretic and swiftly ejected from the political office she held.
The hypocrisy factor is similarly off the charts in the case of the seven adulterous divorcees in congress – and eight if you add the member who was having an affair with one of the seven, though she’d been divorced years earlier so she wasn’t committing adultery but having a secret dalliance with a colleague who was – discussed in this story.
All are Republicans who portray themselves to their constituents as devout Christians familiar with the Seventh Commandment and Proverbs 16:27. With one exception all are also past or present members of the holier-than-thou House Freedom Caucus (HFC) or the 118th Congress’ Values Action Team (VAT), which is dedicated to advancing policies with an aim of “safeguarding families and communities” by promoting “timeless values” and “supporting the institution of marriage,” or both.
“This team that we have assembled, I believe will be able to hit the ground running as we work on the values issues in this new Congress,” Representative Robert Aderholt declared when he assumed leadership of the VAT in January of 2023. He certainly was right about that.
Here’s a roundup I’ve compiled, in alphabetical order, of the House members who helped the VAT and other groups affiliated with the current Moral Majority in congress hit the ground running in 2023 and keep on chugging along nonstop ever since. Bear in mind this list may not prove to be definitive as there are still more than three months to go before the 119th Congress is inaugurated next year.
No. 1: Representative Lauren Boebert, R-Colorado. Member of the VAT and the HFC.
Representative Boebert stood by her future husband years ago after he exposed himself to two young women at a bowling alley. He showed similar compassion last year when she jerked off her date at a children’s musical a month before their divorce was finalized. Photo is Boebert’s official portrait, which she has posted on Twitter.
As the mother of four children who believes “strong families are the foundation of American society,” Representative Boebert’s commitment to traditional values will never waver, she explains on her official congressional home page. Boebert put her words into action last year by giving a handjob to her date at a children’s musical in Denver, which some in the audience didn’t understand was a display of her pro-family zealotry and the misunderstanding led to the pair being expelled from the theater.
To be clear, Boebert’s companion kept his pants on while she was jerking him off, to what exact end isn’t clear. Furthermore, the handjob only amounted to a technical violation of her marital vows because she and her husband, Jayson Boebert, were already separated and their divorce was finalized a month later.
Jayson was very understanding about the incident after it was reported in the press, telling a reporter he himself had been unfaithful to his wife "in so many ways." In fact, years earlier, he and then-future Representative Boebert had a similar experience, which may have been the basis for his compassion.
Back in 2004, a year before Boebert “dropped out of high school to give birth to their first child” and two years before they got married, Jayson escorted her on a date to a bowling area where he exposed himself to two young women, as Salon has reported. He was sentenced to four days and two years on probation for "public indecency and lewd exposure," despite Boebert telling sheriff's deputies it wasn’t his penis he exposed through the zipper of his pants but his thumb, and he was just having some good natured fun.
The cops chose to believe one of the two women who directly witnessed the object in dispute. "I know that wasn't a thumb because thumbs aren't 6 inches long,” she reportedly said.
No. 2: Representative Jeff Duncan, R-South Carolina. Member of the VAT and the HFC.
Like Boebert, his colleague in both the VAT and HFC, Representative Duncan boasts about his dedication to well-established social norms and values on his congressional website. “As a life-long social conservative, I am a strong advocate for life and traditional family values,” he vows. “The most basic component of our society is the family. Now more than ever, it is imperative that we protect the values that America was founded upon and have made our country great.
Tragically, Duncan won’t be serving in congress after this year to demonstrate his personal devotion to the cause because he was forced to announce his premature retirement from the House even as he was campaigning for reelection after his wife Melody filed for divorce on the grounds he’d had “numerous” affairs. One of the women he shacked up with was Liz Williams, a Washington lobbyist who’s worked for the National Rifle Association and represented the tobacco industry and defense contractors.
Melody, his wife of 35 years, sought to terminate their marriage in September 2023, the month after Representative Duncan hosted his 12th annual “Faith & Freedom BBQ” in Anderson, South Carolina, which attracts right-wing leaders and activists from across the country. During the event, Duncan described Melody as a “supportive and loving wife,” according to the New York Post.
So strong was the pull of his new girlfriend, Representative Duncan “went ” according to his then-wife’s divorce filing, and that’s where she “is informed and believes he continues to reside.”
By the middle of this year, Duncan and Williams had made wedding plans and had put up an online gift registry at HoneyFund.com. It soon went viral, but not in a good way, and the soon-to-be newlyweds were forced to take it down.
“To say…[it] did not yield the traditional best wishes for the bride-to-be and congratulations for the groom would be an understatement,” FITSNews, which covers South Carolina politics reported on June 25. “What a damn joke!” one commenter wrote on the online guest book, the publication disclosed. “May you choke on the wine and each get an STD.”
No. 3: Representative Mark Green, R-Tennessee. Member of the VAT and the HFC.
Earlier this month, House Homeland Security Chair and moral paragon Green and opponent of “the woke culture who are trying to cancel people because they believe differently than others,” was revealed to be having an extramarital fling in one of the most awkward ways possible: his estranged wife sent a text message to an undisclosed number of their mutual friends and acquaintances and to his House Republicans colleagues, as was reported in Politico and many other outlets.
Camilla Green’s missives said her husband abandoned her for a 32-year-old woman he met during the course of performing his congressional duties and was three years younger than the couple’s marriage, said an account in the Nashville Banner, which first reported the story. “He fell head over heels in love with her to the extent he wanted to marry her and start a new family,” her twin messages reportedly said.
While she wanted to reconcile, Representative Green scorned her offer as he’d become “intoxicated with power and adoration” and “Satan has rewritten our marriage in his mind,” Camilla continued, adding that he husband had “pushed God out of his life, me out of his life, and developed friendships with other congressmen and women having affairs and getting divorces, drinking, parties, all while hosting a weekly Bible study in the basement of our home.”
No. 4: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia. Former member of HFC.
No one did more to help Congress’ Moral Majority hit the ground running than Greene, the spunky if demented House member who congress who’s represented Georgia since 2021. Indeed, she couldn’t wait to get started and went ahead and finalized her divorce from her husband Perry in December of 2022 after the 118th Congress had been elected the prior month and shortly before it was convened the following one.
Greene, who belonged to the HFC until last year when she was kicked out after feuding with Boebert and other Caucus colleagues over who to support in the race for the incoming House Speaker. She traces the roots of her social conservatism back to biblical times, saying women were made from Adam's rib to serve as "our husband's wife."
What led to the divorce isn’t fully known as both parties argued the “significant privacy interest in sealing the records outweighs the public’s miniscule interest in access to said records,” including “sensitive personal and financial information.” However, the couple have had troubles in the past and had reconciled once before after Greene was the couples' second time filing for divorce: as The Atlantic filed for divorce in 2012 after her husband reportedly learned about the affairs she was conducting with two of her personal trainers at a Crossfit gym.
Nevertheless, Greene, a mother of two, remains as committed to traditional values as ever. “Marriage is a wonderful thing and I’m a firm believer in it,” she wrote in a statement to The Hill after her divorce with Perry was consecrated. “Our society is formed by a husband and wife creating a family to nurture and protect.”
In May of this year, Greene fired her District Director Travis Loudermilk, one of her closest staffers and the son of former Georgia Representative and HFC member Barry Loudermilk, after he was found to be having an affair with a married Instagram influencer, as I first disclosed in the Daily Mail in a story co-authored with one of the newspaper’s staff reporters. MTG, as Greene, is commonly known, reportedly fired Loudermilk because she was afraid the news he was a marital cheat had “made her look bad.”
No. 5: Representative Rich McCormick, R-Georgia. Member of the VAT.
First term Representative Rich McCormick filed for divorce last May amid rumors he was carrying on an affair with Beth Van Duyne, a Texas Republican who McCormick, who’d been married for 12 years, at least scored points for taking God’s orders to Adam and Eve to procreate seriously by having seven children with his apparently future ex-wife.
The affair between the two congressional lovebirds was disclosed by the Daily Mail, after they were ratted out by a GOP member who spotted them “holding hands under the table” at a lunch hosted by the ultraconservative Republican Study Committee, which has described the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015 as a national tragedy that urgently needed to be reversed by working “to promote the truth of marriage between a man and a woman.” Any hopes they had of keeping their romance secret were quickly killed – and presumably any hopes McCormick may have had about keeping his marriage together – when sources told the New York Post they’d seen him and Van Duyne in a number of compromising positions, including “canoodling” in public.
Van Duyne, who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump administration, has two children from a previous marriage that ended in divorce in 2012. Last November, she and fellow congressional divorced adulteress Greene almost came to blows last November when they were fighting to take credit for being first to introduce a censure resolution of Representative Rashida Tlaib for “promoting false narratives” about Hamas and October 7.
No. 6: Representative Max Miller, R-Ohio
The only member of congress on the roster who doesn’t belong to either the VAT or HFC, Representative Miller nevertheless is a card carrying member of the GOP Moral Majority In the House. A former Marine who served as Director of Presidential Advance and a Senior Advisor to President Trump, he won election to his first term in 2022 by campaigning as “a proven conservative fighter who unapologetically puts God, family, and country above himself.”
Miller apparently didn’t put his recent romantic partners above himself based on numerous public accounts published during the past few years. While working for Trump, he met Stephanie Grisham, a White House aide, who he dated for two years.
In 2021, the year after they broke up, Grisham accused Miller of having been "physically abusive” and called him a “liar” who’d "cheated" on her during their relationship. He sued for defamation but eventually dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice.
The same year Grishman leveled the accusations against him, Miller became engaged to Emily Moreno, the daughter of Bernie Moreno, a former moderate Republican who’s currently positioning himself as a MAGA fanatic during his bid to replace incumbent Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in November. Miller and Moreno wed in August of 2022 at New Jersey’s Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, and had a baby girl last year.
On the second anniversary of their wedding this year, Miller filed for divorce, saying she abandoned their family home abruptly and moved into a house she bought without telling him. He also accuses Moreno of threatening to prevent him from seeing their daughter unless he covers the cost of her car insurance and homeowner association fees, which frankly doesn’t seem like a high price to pay .
So far Moreno hasn’t alleged Miller had secret trysts as Grisham did, but she says he’s a drug user and has trashed her to unnamed parties.
No. 7: Representative William Timmons, R-South Carolina. Member of the VAT.
There was instant chemistry between Representative Timmons, seen here in his official 2019 congressional, and the woman he committed adultery with that led to his divorce, which left him no choice but to have repeated sex with her even if she was his wife’s best friend who was living in their house when the affair began. Would Jesus have done otherwise? That’s certainly not the way Timmons interprets the Bible and who can really say if he’s right or wrong?
In 2022, Timmons, who represents an extremely conservative district of extremely conservative South Carolina, sent an oblique message to FITSNews, the outlet mentioned above that’s in the enviable position of being able to frequently write about the continuously clownish antics of the state GOP. The message sought “prayers and privacy” regarding rumors then circulating about an extramarital affair Timmons was allegedly conducting with a lifestyle blogger named Paula Dhier.
“As I’ve often noted, this news outlet did not request a statement from Timmons regarding his mistress and had not indicated we had any plans to cover their tryst,” FITNews publisher Will Folks wrote in a story in June of this year that explained why he remains baffled about why congressman sent him the message in the first place.
“Both Timmons and Dhier were married at the time of their extramarital dalliance,” Fold wrote in the story published three months ago. “In fact, Dhier was best friends with Timmons’ wife and was literally living in their house when the affair kicked off.” Dhier’s husband, real estate developer Ron Rallis, was described as a “social media provocateur who spent three months in jail earlier this year” after being found in contempt by a family court for posting “a series of uncouth Halloween-themed pictures with his young daughter that have sparked revulsion across the socially conservative Upstate region of South Carolina.” Rallis posted the bizarre photos on Instagram, where he wrote, “I may have dropped the soap for ninety days but we all know congressman Timmons takes it in the face all day every day.”
Representative Timmons and his wife divorced in 2023 after four years of marriage. What else took place during their married days that prompted his ex to seek a divorce isn’t known as the couple’s divorce file is sealed.
So much temptation out there. Good thing they can chase Satan out of their homes (after sinning) by proclaiming woke and gay to be bad while clutching a Trump Bible.
IOKIYAR has been true for a long, long time now.