After posting about the FDA's continued suppression of Plan B earlier, a reader passed on a link to the whithering article in the Nation today about Hager's ex-wife's allegations of marital rape and abuse. Linda Carruth Davis (said ex wife) discusses Hager repeatedly raping her when she was asleep (she's narcoleptic) and literally paying for her to perform oral sex. From the Nation:
Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"
Remember, Hager's an ob-gyn specialist... influencing national women's health policy. He should have a pretty good command of female anatomy. Apparently, the political is the private times hypocrisy squared this time...
As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis's allegations take on even more gravity in light of Hager's public role as a custodian of women's health. Some may argue that this is just a personal matter between a man and his former wife--a simple case of "he said, she said" with no public implications. That might be so--if there were no allegations of criminal conduct, if the alleged conduct did not bear any relevance to the public responsibilities of the person in question, and if the allegations themselves were not credible and independently corroborated. But given that this case fails all of those tests, the public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis's charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on women's health issues.
We've already had a boy-raping republican outed this week, now we have a wife-raper influencing our national women's health policy?! How can the self-anointed party of moral values support and promote so many freaked-out sociopaths?
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