First hint this wasn’t going to work out: he’s a pastor

Despite my enduring fondness for the great state of Oregon, I hadn’t been following the politics there, so I missed an amazing turn of good news from the 2025 elections in Oregon.

November’s election told the Oregon Republican Party it needed a fresh start. While voters nationally returned President Donald Trump to the White House, it was a different story in Oregon, where Republicans lost the 5th Congressional District seat; lost all statewide contests; and lost a seat in each legislative chamber, returning the Democrats to supermajorities in both.

Wow. We have to do that in the next election for all 50 states.

As the article points out, the Republicans have had to do some soul-searching and fix what’s wrong with them. I don’t think they can, but it’s good that they’re at least trying. The first step was to find new chairman for the Oregon GOP. They found a guy.

In a Feb. 16 YouTube interview with a GOP political consultant, the eventual winner, Gerald “Jerry” Cummings, 51, a pastor and insurance agent from Columbia County, sketched out a path to success for his party in Oregon, saying Republicans should spend less time “tangled up in social issues” and focus on building the party rather than on angry rhetoric and internecine warfare.

I guess that’s a promising start, but “pastor and insurance agent”? Yuck. I’d put a big red flag on him. But too late, they did more digging and found a few little problems, like his poor relationship with creditors. And his wife.

Court records provide details from a long-running divorce and custody case, which stretched across three counties and lasted nearly a decade, that raise questions about Cummings’ ability to set the tone his party desires. More recently, lawsuits filed by Cummings’ creditors undercut his suitability for a role that requires managerial acumen and financial skills.

Bob Tiernan, a former lawmaker, GOP party chair and the runner-up in the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, says he’s disappointed that Cummings is leading the party. “We need the strongest possible people there,” Tiernan says. “We need somebody that doesn’t have damaging accusations against them—whether they are true or not.”

It was an acrimonious divorce. Cummings is a sicko.

In court records, which have never been previously reported, Cummings’ ex-wife, a pastor’s daughter, said the couple met in the Portland area when she was 16 and he was 26 and an associate pastor. “On occasion, he would visit [her] when her parents were out of town and take her to hotels,” a trial memo filed by her attorney says. “He persuaded her that her parents did not truly love her as only he did, and that having sex with him at such a young age was appropriate.”

The couple married in 2003, when she was 19. “From the beginning of and throughout their marriage, [Cummings] would tell [his then-wife] about his sexual fantasies with young girls while they were having sexual intercourse,” the trial memo says. “He promised not to act on those fantasies so long as [his then-wife] allowed him to do whatever he wanted in their sexual relationship.”

But in a handwritten application for a restraining order coinciding with the divorce filing, the woman said her husband’s behavior spun out of control.

“I was handcuffed and hit with hangers,” she wrote. “Early in the marriage, he had a whip he hit me with.”

She added other allegations, including spousal rape. “He forced me to have sex with him and caused injury,” Cummings’ ex-wife wrote. “He has threatened if I don’t perform sexual activities, he will perform sexual activities on minors and he mentions them by name.” (OJP is not naming Cummings’ ex-wife because of her allegations of sexual violence.)

He denies all the allegations, except, of course, that he committed statutory rape on a 16 year old, and he does admit that he was a terrible husband, and [she] and I, both victims of early sexual assault, had a very unhealthy marriage.

It’s good that he claims he never acted on his pedophilic/hebephilic desires, except of course the fact that he had sex with a 16 year old when he was 26, but still…what is it with conservative authoritarians and their fantasies of having sex with children? Speaking for myself, I’ve never felt that — if anything I’m repelled at the idea — but I guess if you’re Republican, it’s just normal.

Anyway, it’s telling that when the Oregon Republicans decided to dive back into the pool of candidates and find someone new and fresh and full of healthy ideas to reinvigorate the party, all they came up with is another rotten apple. I guess if all you’ve got is a big barrel of rotting fruit, you’re not going to find a shiny clean unblemished representative by rummaging through it.

This goes for the Democrats, too — we’re less likely to come up with a pedo, but instead will find a shriveled, nearly mummified old gomer who will persist in pushing the failed ideas of the past.