Gattsuru's Rambling Spot

mugasofer:

cptsdcarlosdevil:

feel really sad that that politician lost his job for being a furry :/

Does he have some kind of gofundme we could contribute to?

[context, further context]

His job is to be a trial lawyer, and it doesn’t look like the scandal’s really touched that.  It’s possible for someone to be disbarred for personal conduct and this certainly isn’t great for his criminal defense work, but it takes some doing and there’s a lot of procedural protections and none of the first steps are on record.  Town council are sometimes compensated positions, but they’re usually not thing people do for the money so much as for helping (for widely varying definitions of ‘help’) the community and they’re not a full-time or even significant part-time position.

I’m not aware of any GoFundMe or similar effort.

@viridixa :

Not that this is better, but iirc he was fairly open about being a furry (or at least not particularly secretive), and the reason people really started going off at him was because he said he “tolerates” rape as a fetish on some website.

As far as I can tell, it was the kink list; he’d spoken at conventions, and his twitter had been mixing fursuiting and his political advances for a bit.

That gets kinda complicated because SoFurry use “tolerate” in the classical sense of “don’t like, but won’t beat you up over”. (Akin to how F-List uses ‘Maybe’ on its Fave/Like/Maybe/No scale).  A lot of people even have leftover stuff on those from earlier versions of the site when there were hints it was going to act as a content filter.  For comparison, the guy’s very overtly straight: when he put ‘c*** boy’ (a somewhat controversial term for male characters with vaginas) on his ‘tolerate’ list that wasn’t a hint he’s harboring a Buck Angel fetish.

That said, he’d written some stuff on other topics that were much more politically radioactive.  There’s some nitpicking you could do here, but it’s the sorta nitpicking that gets a whole lot of really angry Harry Potter shippers precipitating from the walls at best, and long theoretical discussions about how it’s not technically illegal while everyone slowly backs away more often.  While those have been removed since, it’s probably the sorta thing that everyone involved wants to sweep under the rug as quietly as possible.

That said, while he’s a public figure and his actual kinks are more unpleasant than (for a random example) Ken Bone’s pregnancy fetish, it’s still doesn’t settle well with me.  The BoozyBarristar context link goes over how this might be politically motivated, or it might have been some inner-community drama that someone decided to escalate, but more importantly he’s just not that big a fish.  He’s technically a public figure only in the same sense that Ken Bone was: even if you lived in his small town you probably didn’t know his name.  Town council decision-making involves stuff like balancing between school funding and roadwork; even if his dark heart had bad beliefs his council seat gave him no greater position to abuse others than anyone else.  As a lawyer, he hadn’t gotten an ethics complaint since 89, which takes some pretty good work.

He didn’t do a lot of stuff he could have to defend his privacy, but no one can do enough to prevent dedicated attackers.  And while I’m uncomfortable with his kinks, I’m pretty sure that the political party kicking him out isn’t drawing a bright line cleanly derived from first principles (and, uh… wouldn’t kick me out).