WARNING: This story includes details and links of a pornographic nature that are probably not safe for work.
Thanks to a tip from a perceptive Twitter user, the Informer discovered a curious pornographic inclusion among the list of tweets recently liked by the account of Jason Schultz, a Republican state senator from the western Iowa town of Schleswig who last year won an award from a prominent religious-right organization for his “Christ-like service to the people of Iowa as an elected representative.”
The tweet was posted by an account run by a self-described “stay at home MILF” going by the name HotTurkishCurves. The account promotes content published on Pornhub and the subscription service OnlyFans from a “real couple creating fun homemade pornos.”
“Hope you’re enjoying this weeks [sic] new PornHub videos! What do you want to see next?!” the tweet reads, followed by 19 hashtags including #slutwife, #wifeexposed, and #soccermom. It also includes a sexually explicit photo of a woman wearing crotchless lingerie, her back facing the camera so that her vagina is clearly displayed.
“I do not know how my account liked the tweet in question,” Schultz told the Informer Tuesday afternoon in response to a request for comment, shortly after he unliked the tweet. “It’s possible my account was compromised or the tweet was liked on accident,” the married father of two added.
Although HotTurkishCurves’ Pornhub promotion was added on September 28, it appeared that Schultz encountered the tweet about a month ago, at the beginning of January. Thirteen chronological likes from the top, it sat just below tweets he enjoyed from QAnon-supporting Congresswoman Lauren Boebert warning of President Biden’s plans “to strip away your Second Amendment rights” and Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann blaming the deadly pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol on the “hostile rhetoric” of Democrats. The tweet was nestled between a January 3 video from incoming Iowa Congresswoman Ashley Hinson and a January 1 post from Iowa House Republican Shannon Latham showing off one of her Christmas presents: the latest romance novel by Nicholas Sparks.
A grown man with a (disputed, in this case) interest in pornography is nothing unusual, of course, but Schultz has long positioned himself as a defender of socially conservative family values. After the Iowa Supreme Court legally recognized same-sex marriage in 2009, he introduced legislation premised on the fanciful notion that judges should be prohibited from citing judicial precedent or case law in future rulings. He also co-sponsored a bill intended to strip anti-bullying protections from gay and transgender students.
Among the numerous non-pornographic tweets liked by Schultz’s Twitter account was one from last July by Republican state Senator Annette Sweeney. She included photos from the annual summit hosted by The Family Leader, the socially conservative advocacy organization led by Bob Vander Plaats, who is arguably Iowa’s preeminent opponent of LGBTQ rights. “Especially exciting to hear from @RickSantorum and @Jason_Schultz,” Sweeney cheered.
That same month, TFL presented Schultz with its annual Dwayne Alons Award, named after a former state lawmaker who died of cancer in 2014. Before Alons’ death, the organization established the annual award it later renamed in his honor “to publicly thank those who have gone the 2nd mile in exhibiting Christ-like leadership, as they champion the family-strengthening values that are so desperately needed in our homes, churches, and government, and that are so under attack today.”
“I will not allow an intentional attack, or an unintentional incident, to undermine my efforts to advocate for a conservative agenda for Iowa.”
In the eyes of TFL, those values include the steadfast opposition to all pornography. This actually contributed to a national controversy in 2011, when the organization lobbied presidential candidates to sign an anti-porn pledge affirming their commitment to protect women and children “from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.” The pledge was criticized as an attack on free speech and also provoked outrage over language arguing that homosexuality was a choice and African-American children were more likely to be raised in a two-parent home under slavery than during Obama’s presidency.
Rick Santorum, who narrowly won Iowa’s Republican presidential caucus the following January, was one of the first candidates to sign the pledge. But others kept their distance. Even Jeff Kaufmann, the Trump-loving Iowa GOP chairman who at the time was a state representative, criticized its “ridiculous implications” and dismissed Vander Plaats as a man whose “political credibility is waning to the point of no impact.”
But the commotion did little to halt TFL’s crusade against porn. In recent years, the organization has regularly enlisted the help of people like Luke Hukee, a pastor at the Walnut Creek Church in Des Moines, to speak out against what they decry as the “pornography crisis.” Likening porn to a destructive drug, they’ve argued it’s an addiction that “has become an epidemic in America, but is often accepted, even embraced, by the wider culture.” As such, TFL has offered followers struggling with porn addictions religious-based resources to help them get right with God.
In his response to our request for comment, Schultz told the Informer, “Pornography has significant negative effects on individuals involved specifically and the culture more broadly.” He then reiterated his assertion that he was either hacked or liked HotTurkishCurves’ tweet by mistake: “I will not allow an intentional attack, or an unintentional incident, to undermine my efforts to advocate for a conservative agenda for Iowa.”
The denial of wrongdoing calls to mind a similar incident involving Ted Cruz, the Texas senator whose 2016 presidential bid Schultz endorsed. A year after the election, journalists noticed that Cruz’s official Twitter account had liked a tweet featuring a hardcore porn video. Someone with access to the account later unliked the tweet and Cruz chalked it up to a staffer who’d “inadvertently hit the like button.”
