Lindsey Graham died last night, and I am not going to pretend to grieve a man who spent thirty years proving my mother right.
I was born in 1982 and raised Mormon in a conservative home, which is probably not the opening you were expecting from the person writing this. My mom was born in 1957, never officially a hippie, though we always joked she was one underneath it all, and never a Democrat either. Our house was conservative, the way Mormon homes were conservative, by culture and by default more than by declaration. But there were three names my mom said with regularity, in a tone I can still hear, one that she saved for men she found rotten: Lindsey Graham, Rush Limbaugh, and Donald Trump.
Those names were household regulars during my childhood and teenage years. Limbaugh went national on the radio when I was six and never shut up after that. Trump spent my elementary school years as a tabloid fixture, the rich man in the news for casinos and cruelty. Graham arrived when I was sixteen, a House impeachment manager prosecuting a president on the Senate floor for lying about an affair while building the career that would make lying his entire profession. My mom watched all three of them from her kitchen and saw the same thing in each one, and she saw it without a political party telling her to look.
My parents actually held up their Christian values, where words, thoughts, and actions all have to match every day, whether anyone was watching or not. My mom did not need these men to be in the right or wrong party to see them clearly. She has always lived by a standard of alignment, and these were the three loudest men in America getting rich and powerful by never once meeting it.
In 1998 and 1999, Graham was one of the House managers prosecuting Bill Clinton's impeachment, standing in the well of the Senate, arguing that character is destiny and that a man who lies about sex cannot be trusted with power. Hold that thought, because everything Graham did for the next twenty-five years was a test of whether he himself believed a word of it.
He spent those years voting against queer people at every opportunity he got. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 as a freshman congressman. He supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He voted against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 2010, against the Equality Act, and against the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, a bill that did nothing more radical than protect marriages that already existed. When a New York Times Magazine profile asked him about his sexuality in 2010, he answered that he was not available and not gay, delivered as a joke at gay men's expense. That is the closest he ever came to addressing the question that followed him his entire career.
And it did follow him. For decades, there were persistent rumors in Washington about Graham and male escorts, rumors that went viral in 2020 when an adult film performer publicly accused him of hiring sex workers under nondisclosure agreements. Those allegations were never independently verified, and at least one of the most repeated details came from a satire piece that people shared as fact. I am not going to claim proof that does not exist, because that is what these men do, and I was raised better. What I will say is this. Graham had a thousand chances to defend queer people's dignity, including possibly his own, and he spent every one of them voting the other way. Whether the rumors were true or not, he chose a career built on punishing people for the kind of love he was accused of hiding. If they were false, he was merely cruel. If they were true, he was cruel to his own reflection. There is no version where he was aligned.
Then came the years that made him famous for something other than the impeachment. In December 2015, he called Donald Trump a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot, on camera, in those words. Within two years, he was Trump's golf partner and one of his most reliable defenders in the Senate. In 2016, he told reporters to use his words against him if a Supreme Court vacancy ever opened in an election year under a Republican president, promising he would insist the next president fill it. He broke that promise for Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation fight and shattered it for Amy Coney Barrett, whose nomination he rushed through weeks before the 2020 election as Judiciary chairman. And after that election, he personally called Georgia's secretary of state to ask questions about tossing ballots, a call the secretary of state described as a suggestion to find ways to exclude legal votes, which Graham denied meaning that way. He was the character witness for the republic in 1999 and a character in the plot against it in 2020, and he never seemed to notice the distance between the two.
My mom noticed men like that instantly, and taught me to. She could always smell a person whose convictions were rented.
Limbaugh's national show launched in 1988, and one of his early recurring segments was called AIDS Update, where he mocked the deaths of gay men while a song about looking for love played underneath. Men were dying by the tens of thousands, and he built a comedy bit out of it. He eventually dropped the segment and called it a mistake, which is the single recorded instance of Rush Limbaugh apologizing for anything, and it took dead men to get it.
He coined the word "feminazi" and used it for thirty years to describe women who wanted equal pay and control of their own bodies. He told his audience in 1995 that people who use drugs ought to be convicted and sent up the river, and then, in 2003, the world learned he had been illegally obtaining thousands of opioid pills through his housekeeper. He did not go up the river. He went to rehab and back to the microphone because the punishment he prescribed was always for other people. He mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms on air in 2006, accusing him of exaggerating his tremors. He spent three days in 2012 calling a Georgetown law student a slut and a prostitute because she testified about contraception coverage. He played a song called Barack the Magic Negro. And in 2020, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, live at the State of the Union, from the third name on my mother's list.
There is no arc to Limbaugh, no fall from principle, because there was never a principle to fall from. He is on this list because he taught two generations of Americans that contempt is entertainment, making way for many after him, and my mom recognized the product for what it was the first time she heard it coming out of a car radio.
People talk about Trump like he changed at some point, like the president was a departure from the businessman. My mom knew better in the 80s, because the record was already public.
In 1973, the Justice Department sued Trump and his father for refusing to rent apartments to Black tenants, one of the largest housing discrimination cases of its era. In 1989, he took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers calling for the death penalty in the Central Park jogger case, while five Black and Latino teenagers were being interrogated. Those five boys were convicted, imprisoned, and fully exonerated by DNA evidence in 2002, and Trump never apologized. He has instead continued to insist on their guilt for the rest of his public life. Through the 80s and 90s, his casinos went through repeated bankruptcies while contractors, small family businesses, plumbers, painters, and cabinet makers ate the losses on work they had already finished. He treated marriage vows the way he treated invoices, publicly and repeatedly, while the tabloids kept score.
None of what came later was a surprise. It was a rerun. The man my mom named in her kitchen in the 90s is the same man, unchanged, who now has senators eulogizing his loyalty like it was a virtue.
Here is my institutional argument, and it is aimed at the culture I grew up in. American Christianity, including the Mormonism that raised me, spent my whole life treating Republican as a synonym for righteous. The assumption was baked in so deep that nobody needed to say it out loud. You voted the way the group voted because good people vote for the party of good people, and the men at the top of that party were presumed to share your values because they said your words back to you.
My mother is the counterexample that broke the whole formula for me. She was inside that culture, shaped by it, voting alongside it for many years, but she was still able to identify three of the most celebrated men on her own side of the aisle as frauds, decades before it was fashionable, because she was not judging them by their words. She was judging them by the alignment between their words and their lives. Graham said character mattered and spent his career proving his was for sale. Limbaugh preached law and order for everyone but himself. Trump wrapped himself in a flag he treated like every contractor he ever stiffed. The party said these were her people. Her values said otherwise, and she trusted her values.
Lindsey Graham is dead, and tributes are already calling him a statesman. I keep thinking about my mom instead, a woman with no platform and no party loyalty worth mentioning, who ran a household where what you said, what you believed, and what you did had to be the same thing, and who could therefore spot a hollow man on a television screen from across the kitchen.
I was raised by people who did integrity the hard way. That is why I never learned to be impressed by men who only did the easy part, the saying, and it is why I feel no obligation to perform grief for one of them today. My mother measured Lindsey Graham thirty years ago. History just finished writing the proof.
