Y’all, go read Cari Wade Gervin’s story about state Sen. Joey Hensley. Call your LGBT friends and read it out loud to them. Call everyone you know in his district and ask them what the hell they’re thinking.

The details sound straight out of a soap opera. A doctor and his younger nurse fall in love. They continue their torrid affair even after his ex-wife tips off the nurse’s husband, a local politician, to the salacious goings-on. As the divorce moves forward, discovery turns up that the nurse is not just the doctor’s employee and his lover, but his patient, with a predilection for pain pills. And, oh, she’s his second cousin, too.

Joey Hensley has been married and divorced four times. He has the gall to be offended by gay people and to champion conservative laws designed to screw them over. And here he is, fooling around with his employee, prescribing her drugs, helping her cheat on her spouse and going through wives like some folks go through toilet paper. The audacity of it is breathtaking.

LGBT people in Tennessee are, by and large, boring, ordinary people who just want the right to marry the people they love and to make families that are stable and legally protected. Every once in a while you’ll get some activist who’s like, “I’m going to march in the Pride Parade wearing only my cock ring!” But considering how many people get drunk and streak through their college campuses or go skinny dipping, even that’s not that shocking. And, I’m sorry, I wish people were more interesting, but even Mr. Cock Ring spends a lot of time doing laundry, paying bills and picking at weird ingrown hairs.

So it fundamentally offends me that boring, ordinary people who just want stability and legal protections are understood by most state politicians as being huge pervert sinners who must have the fuck legislated out of them by “good Christians,” while the “good Christians” are playing hide-the-pickle with their subordinates, divorcing like it’s their hobby and prescribing drugs to a person they’re fucking. All while also being state legislators! And do these “good Christian” legislators ever die of shame or get struck by lightning by a vengeful God? No. Which somehow makes the insult worse.

(Side note: Sen. Hensley is one of the sponsors of the resolution allowing Columbia to steal the bodies of James K. and Sarah Polk from us. But I think, in light of these allegations, clearly the state legislature should reconsider. Hensley should not be allowed around any man’s wife at this point, let alone be in charge of deciding where she lays.)

It is no wonder Jeremy Durham was allowed to go on as long as he was, if this is how state legislators conduct themselves.

But, also, it personally offends me that Joey Hensley is being so dumb here. There’s his girlfriend, testifying under oath about their affair and saying how she spent two nights with him here in Nashville last month on the taxpayers’ dime, and he doesn’t have sense enough to keep his mouth shut.

He tells Gervin, “It’s not still ongoing. That was several months ago, years ago.”

Oh, Hensley, bless your heart. When a woman is in a high-stress situation like a divorce, you don’t make her feel like she didn’t mean anything to you. Have you not even a lick of sense?

Lastly, women of Hohenwald, do you not have girlfriends down there? Is there no one to take you aside and tell you hard truths? How is Joey Hensley finding so many women down there to fuck and fuck over? One or two of y’all I could understand, but this is ridiculous.

Listen, you don’t want a serious relationship with a man who’s been married four times. Also, if he wants to fuck you in your place of employment, it’s kind of a red flag that he’s a thrill-seeker and a boundary-pusher, which doesn’t bode well for him settling down and being good to you. Along those same lines, anything he’ll do with you, he’ll do to you. And fourth, DO NOT MARRY THIS MAN ANYMORE. He is not going to change. Your cooter, which I’m sure is very lovely, is not magic and is not going to Beauty-and-the-Beast him into being a good boyfriend or, God forbid, husband.

I will even concede that, at this point, he might be a fantastic lay, and, sweethearts, we’ve all been there. A man who can reliably make you come can be hard to walk away from. But a good-hearted boring man who respects you can be taught. You don’t have to settle for being the potential fifth wife of a guy who won’t even admit the scope of your relationship.

My God, please, don’t settle for a man who can sin this egregiously and still find it in his heart to try to punish other sinners legislatively however he can. That kind of hypocrisy is soul-rotting, and you deserve better than someone with a rotten soul.