As Valleywag reported yesterday, Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman is attempting, largely in vain, to erase his increasingly embarrassing Republican past. One has a tinge of sympathy. Hoffman is hugely ambitious; he has traded on his connections. Hoffman wasn't to know that an association with George Bush, with whom the champion networker was photographed twice, would become such a liability as the President's popularity declined. And he must have been surprised to be touched by Republican scandal when Christian Bailey, one of the people he met in young conservative circles, was accused of taking money from Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon to bring Iraqi journalists. But there's one association, with a particularly fruit-hating Republican politician, that Hoffman should have known to avoid.

Senator Sam Brownback, pictured left, is not your standard-issue Republican politician, pandering alternately to the religious right and business lobbyists. This possible presidential candidate is a hardcore social conservative, so passionately hostile to abortion that he regards fetuses as citizens, so religious that Rolling Stone called him God's Senator.

Most notoriously, Brownback criticized countries like Sweden which allow civil unions between couples of the same sex. Though he later denied any intentional slur, Brownback quoted from the bible: "You'll know them by their fruits." And, even less ambiguously, Brownback's chief of staff bemoaned the fate of innocent gay sperm forced to "swim into feces".

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