At the moment, 2026 Democratic senatorial nominee Graham Platner of Maine — my mother’s home state — has been sucking up all of the news coverage, following the accusations by a fellow Democratic woman that he broke into her house and raped her. The Democrats were OK with his Totenkopf death head tattoo, with his cheating on his wife, with toxic social media posts, and his blatant anti-Semitism, but finally, finally! the Democrats are abandoning him. Subsequent to that, The Washington Post published complaints by a former girlfriend that Mr Platner covertly removed his condom, which she had required for consent to sex with him, and continued to f(ornicate) with her, something which is a crime, albeit only a civil offense, in Maine.

They shouldn’t be surprised. They loved the charismatic bad boy who promotes socialism and hates Jews, because many of today’s Democrats promote socialism and hate Jews, but the trouble with the bad boys is that you never really know when the next bad story will drop.

But I’ll let other people write about Mr Platner and his troubles. I am more concerned about 2026 Democratic senatorial nominee James Talarico of Texas. We have previously noted Mr Talarico, a seminarian with the Presbyterian Church USA. Mr Talarico pretends to be tells us that he is a devout Christian, but he supports prenatal infanticide, using the story of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) as a supposedly Christian argument for it, supports “trans children”, and The Advocate, a ‘magazine’ which supports homosexuality and transgenderism, has said the candidate “has positioned himself as a fierce queer ally, even using the Bible to advocate in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.”

PCUSA declares support for body-deforming trans surgeries for kids

By Michael Gryboski, Editor | Monday, July 6, 2026

The Presbyterian Church (USA), the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States, has passed a measure expressing support for body-deforming sex-change surgeries for youth exhibiting gender dysphoria.

At a plenary session for the PCUSA’s 227th General Assembly held last week, delegates voted 441-30 in favor of an overture called GEN-02, also known as “On Access to Healthcare.”

The rationale for the overture describes so-called “gender-affirming care” as “medically necessary and evidence based for the well-being of many transgender, non-binary, and gender- expansive people who experience symptoms of gender dysphoria or distress that result from having one’s gender identity not match their sex assigned at birth.”

GEN-02 also denounces state bans on the chemical and surgical mutilation of children’s bodies, labeling them as stopping young people “from accessing medically necessary, safe health care backed by decades of research and supported by every major medical association representing over 1.3 million US doctors.”

The Rev. Olivia Lane, moderator of the 227th General Assembly’s Gender and Sexuality Justice Committee, explained to those gathered that her committee amended the overture to remove the phrase “including minors” from the text, which originally read “the PC(USA) supports all individuals, including minors, to have access to all medically necessary, evidence-based gender-affirming healthcare.”

There’s more, all of it aligned with leftist politics:

The largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States voted Tuesday evening (June 30) to recognize Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide, two days after the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) unanimously voted to divest from Palantir Technologies and General Electric Aerospace over technologies used in the war.

Tuesday’s vote at the denomination’s General Assembly in Milwaukee passed 454-15 and called for Presbyterians to also lobby Congress for an arms embargo against Israel and to boycott Israeli products that contribute to the war.

The PCUSA were facing a proposal to require all ordained ministers to be monogamous, a rather simple and obvious thing, but rather than following through, they sent it to a committee for further study:

The overture, CON-10, has generated strong reactions online but not yet earned broad support from PCUSA groups. A separate proposal asks for theological studies on gender and sexuality, life-giving relationships and the Christian vocation of family that would support the denomination’s commitment to inclusion of different familial realities. Together, these overtures show that as polyamory gains visibility in broader culture, it may have policy implications, especially in theologically progressive Christian denominations.

The Presbyterian Church USA is not the only Presbyterian Church in the United States; the Presbyterian Church in America is the second-largest Presbyterian group, and they are not pursuing the trendiness of the PCUSA.

This is the tangential danger of the revelations about Mr Platner. Mr Talarico is just as far left as Mr Platner, but he’s a good boy, there are no sex or rape scandals about him, so he could be viewed as an OK candidate, especially when running against Ken Paxson, a candidate with something of a checkered past. People have to realize that Mr Talarico is just the milquetoast version of Mr Platner, less likely to get in any scandals, but who would nevertheless vote exactly the way the candidate from Maine would. In a very narrowly divided Senate, President Trump could lose on every one of his judicial nominees for the remainder of his term. Already our nation’s second longest serving Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas in May of 2028, if he stays on the Court, will pass William O Douglas’ record of over 36 years as our longest-serving Justice . . . and if the Democrats control the Senate, President Trump might not get confirmed a nominee with a similar judicial philosophy.

Justice Thomas just turned 78 years old.

We have got to retain control of the United States Senate.

Mr Platner is a thorough dirtbag, both politically and personally. The danger is that Mr Talarico is a thorough dirtbag politically, but he’s just such a nice guy personally. The Dems will present him as a Presbyterian seminarian, but it matters which branch of the Presbyterian Church he serves, and we can’t let that slip past.