Indiana Rep. Mark Souder, an eight-term Republican who promoted abstinence education, said Tuesday he'll resign from Congress after admitting an extramarital affair with a part-time staff member.
Souder won a bruising primary just two weeks ago, and the resignation effective Friday could hurt the GOP's chances of holding onto the Republican-leaning district in November in a year that many expect will favor the party.
Souder, an evangelical Christian who has championed family values and traditional marriage, apologized for his actions but provided no details during an emotional news conference at his Fort Wayne office.
"I am so ashamed to have hurt the ones I love," he said as he battled tears. "I am sorry to have let so many friends down, people who have worked so hard for me."
[…] Throughout his time in Congress, Souder made his evangelical Christianity a centerpiece of his public persona. He was known for his outspoken views on religion and his uncompromising conservative positions on social issues such as abortion.
He said after a 2008 hearing on abstinence-only education that the only fully reliable way young people can protect themselves from pregnancy and STDs is by "abstaining from sex until in a committed, faithful relationship."
Around the same time, he also recorded a video interview with a staff member in which he stressed the importance of abstinence education.
Better: Saudi Arabia:
It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.
When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.
But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.
A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.
For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.
According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.
"To see resistance from a woman means a lot," Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a Saudi women’s rights activist, told The Media Line news agency. "People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years. This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance."
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