Surprise! Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill
McCollum still opposes gay adoption -- notwithstanding the spectacular
downfall of his hand-picked anti-gay expert, George Alan Rekers.
"I don't believe the gay family model is good for kids," McCollum said this week to the Sun-Sentinel -- which duly noted that one of his campaign advisers is a gay man with a husband and two kids. Details, really.
McCollum
also wants everyone to know that it wasn't a mistake to rent Rekers, as
it were, to testify against gay adoption in 2008 -- and then overpay him
by double in possible violation of contract terms.
New Times caught Rekers in May
coming back from a two-week vacation in Europe with a 20-year-old male
escort, igniting international headlines and a scandal for McCollum--who
was then the front-runner for governor, and now trails Republican rival
Rick Scott and Democrat Alex Sink.
Poor, put-upon McCollum: How could he have known "that" about Rekers when he hired him in 2008?
Here's McCollum's weaseling excuse to The Sun-Sentinel, with references to "the hullabaloo" and "that":
"Knowing
what I know now, I would never have hired him. But at the time, I think
it was the appropriate thing to do. We followed the advice of our
appellate counsel who was trying to prepare a case for appeal[...]
Now,
with all of the hullabaloo that's gone on over him, of course I
wouldn't have if I'd known that about him. But I didn't know that about
him.
He was the best expert available and willing to testify."
This is just the latest in a line of shabby lies and distortions out of McCollum ever since Rekers' epic EuroTrip:
- Initially,
McCollum claims that the Department of Health and Human Services hired
Rekers. Documents surface showing that McCollum insisted on Rekers --
over the strong objections of both Health and Human Services and his own
assistant attorney general.
- McCollum says there was a "thorough
search" for a witness, but "not a whole lot of choice." Then it emerges
that 30 expert witnesses were considered. Thirty.
- McCollum says:
"I think there should be no doubt about the fact that he actually
performed the function that he was asked to do, he did the work." In
fact, Rekers' testimony was trashed by the presiding judge as absolutely
worthless.
When it comes out that Rekers was paid nearly
$120,000 for his worthless testimony, double the amount stipulated in
his contract, McCollum says: "This is not a case of overpaying him, he
was paid a reasonable fee." But the Miami Herald reports: "A 2008 Florida purchase requisition states that no payment to Rekers should exceed $60,900."
Thanks
to McCollum's personal intercession, Rekers took the stand, where he
also condemned adoption by Native-Americans and carefully distanced
himself from another anti-gay pseudo-academic, Paul Cameron.
Don't
know Cameron? He's a close friend of both Rekers and the other expert
witness hired by McCollum. Cameron has said that gays with HIV/AIDS
should be quarantined, and, in a 1999 research paper, wrote admiringly
of Rudolf Hoss's punishment regimen for homosexuals in the Nazi
concentration camps. None of this stopped Cameron's research from being
cited in another 2004 Florida case that upheld the gay adoption ban when
Charlie Crist was attorney general. At the time, who vouched for
Cameron's character to the state? None other than George Rekers.