Alex Chadwell, who is gay, accused Rep. Troy Nehls, his chief of staff, and special adviser of regularly making homophobic comments at work like “gays go to hell."

A former congressional staffer has filed a lawsuit against Texas Republican U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls, claiming he was forced to quit his position due to a “hostile work environment.”

Alex Chadwell, who is gay and began working for Nehls in January 2021, accused the representative, his chief of staff, and special adviser of regularly making homophobic comments such as “gays go to hell” or “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." He said that the chief of staff even once told him “not to engage with gay constituents."

Chadwell claimed that Nehls’s special adviser kept an anti-LGBTQ+ poster in his office specifically to mock him and would often point at it in his presence, saying things like “We don’t need to let gays into military" or “We don’t need to support the queers."

  • weariedfae@lemmy.world
    17·
    2 months ago

    Do staffers choose who they work for or is there like a pool and they get assigned when someone is elected? Or they are holdovers from the last person who held the position or something?

    Basically, is this a truly exquisite case of leopards ate my face? Or is just kinda tragic? Because if the staffer is a republican then this is truly amazing levels of what-did-you-expect.

    • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
      9·
      2 months ago

      There’s a third option: badass labor activist. Maybe he just works for places that seem like they’d be awful to try and get them in trouble for violating labor laws.

    • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 months ago

      Generally they apply through the state party, often because they know someone.

      Otherwise it’s connections through the polisci programs, the professors help them get their resumes out, or again the state parties do.

      For more powerful offices it’s mostly the professors at gt, jfk, Yale, etc, then they recruit people they know and trust from home, scions of rich donors who went to the right schools.

      For lower power offices and representatives you basically just send your resume and their chief of staff reviews it like any job. They also have a ton of interns, similar process, influential offices use connections, lower offices get whats left. Finally there’s the page program, connections help to get in, professors often encourage kids to apply.

      For the lower levels a lot of it is energy, the jobs barely pay and they’re miserable, so anyone who volunteered on a campaign has a good shot for a freshman congressman whose seat wasn’t heavily contested.