An Oklahoma state senator offered money to a teenage boy for "sexual stuff" and was found with him in a hotel room that reeked of "raw marijuana," authorities said.... State Sen. Ralph Shortey, 35, and the teenager admitted to police they had engaged in conversations "pertaining to sexual activities in exchange for money," a police detective wrote in a court affidavit for a search warrant. The affidavit only identified Shortey as R.S. and the teenager as H.L., but Mashburn has confirmed that Shortey is the adult under investigation. Both names were redacted in the police report.... Police were told the teenage boy had a history of drug abuse and "soliciting himself on Craigslist for sexual conduct." Police launched the investigation after being called by the boy's father, who had been contacted by his son's girlfriend.
Ralph Shortey is a family values conservative because OF COURSE he's a family values conservative. He's also a big Trump supporter—he had dinner with Donald Trump Jr. the night before he got caught in a hotel room with a teenage boy—and has backed anti-trans "bathroom bills" in Oklahoma to protect women and girls because OF COURSE HE HAS. The Daily Beast has more on his record...
As a lawmaker, Shortey has been a right-wing stalwart. In 2011, he proposed a bill that would strip undocumented immigrants of property used in the commission of a crime. “We are not saying they are less than human,” he said, according to the Tulsa World. “What we are saying is they are not Americans and have no rights thereof.”
The same year, Shortey proposed a bill requiring presidential candidates to submit their birth certificates to the election board before appearing on an Oklahoma ballot. And in January 2012, he took on the issue of aborted fetuses, hidden in our food. “No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients,” the bill proposed by Shortey read.
More recently, Shortey threw his support behind the Trump-led crackdown on so-called “sanctuary cities,” alleging that undocumented immigrants from Central America were engaged in child sex trafficking.
"When you incentivize illegal immigration, you incentivize a lot of bad things,” Shortey told KFOR-TV in February.
Shortey is married to his high school sweetheart, he has three kids of his own, and he was just stripped "of all the privileges of holding elected office, including his office, parking space, and government-issued computer," the Daily Beast reports.
And again: Considering all the new forms of Republican hypocrisy we've been treated/subjected to over the last eight weeks, what Shorty got caught doing—protecting marriage and the family from the the queers while soliciting teenage boys for sex—seems like a quaint throwback to more innocent times.
UPDATE: I was boarding a flight when I tossed this up and the last thing I Googled, er, the last thing I began to research was Shortey's record on marijuana. I had a hunch Shortey's hypocrisy extend to pot, but I ran out of time before I could dig through his voting record and had to dash to my gate. Thankfully Amanda Kerri was on the case:
Last November, in what may surprise some of you, Oklahomans actually passed a state referendum to reduce many drug laws from a felony to a misdemeanor and to increase funding for drug rehabilitation. Hey, what can I say? Even in red states like Oklahoma we’re tired of the "War on Drugs." Well, Shortey felt that Oklahomans didn’t know what was best for themselves and introduced legislation to overturn that vote and maintain many of the felony marijuana laws. What makes this so extra? When the police showed up at the hotel where Shortey and his underage escort were, they detected a very strong odor of the devil's weed, which according to the police report wasn’t found anywhere, but was probably flushed down the toilet. They did find lotion and condoms, so you know, at least they were practicing safe sex.
