[UPDATED 7/31/2014]: Here’s the uncensored photo….
Another day in Washington state politics. Apparently it is like the town in “Footloose” on the other side of the Cascades. Amy Biviano, Democratic candidate for Spokane Valley’s 4th District House of Representatives, has been “outed” for having posed for Playboy magazine’s “Women of the Ivy League” in 1995. She was a student at Yale at the time
“Outed” is a stretch of the term since Amy Biviano, nee Amy Nabors, wrote a passionate, no-apologies essay about her experience around the time the Playboy pictorial was published:
So do I believe that my future might be affected by posing for Playboy? Yes, I believe that it will. But, it has made a positive contribution to my life – I gained a sense of self-reliance which I lacked before the posing scandal. Yes, it was fun to have my five minutes of fame both on the Yale campus and on the national scene. It is a nice little boost to the ego to know that some people consider me to be attractive enough to be in Playboy. But of course I know now, and I knew when I first chose to pose, that these benefits will fade, and they will only be remembered by a few people searching through dusty archives. However, posing for Playboy has permanently changed me by making me think a little bit differently about myself – I’m now more of a risk-taker, fear social approval less, and know a bit more about what I’m capable of. I may never do something this controversial again, but it’s nice to know that I could and did.
Amy Biviano, a Sunday school teacher and business owner, is in a brutal race with Matt Shea (R-4th district) in a heavily Republican area. She trailed Shea by 20 points in the August primary.
It has been reported that Shea has posted photographs on Facebook of himself smiling outside her house and refused to remove them. The congressman has also labeled Biviano a “radical socialist.”
So when the conservative website Western Center for Journalism gleefully “exposed” Amy Biviano for her past work for what they call the “soft porno magazine” Playboy, it simply added the personal attacks on top of the idealogical slander of her opponent.
Biviano is a far from a socialist (she’s a corporatist who believes in the privatization of worker’s comp programs) and her support for abortion rights and marriage equality are the majority opinions of Washingtonians. There is nothing “radical” about her platform.
One has to ask themselves if they are willing to not vote for a candidate with whom they agree on the issues, simply because they chose to pose nude during college. Eastern Washington is in the midst of recovering from a bad fire season and an even worse economy. Those should be the issues, not whether someone was naked in the 90s.
If you are without sin, we’d love to hear from you in the COMMENTS section. If you have a lot of sins, we’ve love to hear from you even more so.
[UPDATE]: Amy Biviano’s congressional opponent Rep. Matt Shea has “condemned” the release of Biviano’s Playboy past. A heavy emphasis of the QUOTE, UNQUOTE. Shea postures with a good old-fashioned “Have you stop beating you wife” technique full of snark and backhanded concern:
I am saddened by the release by a national media outlet of my opponent’s involvement in pornography. I strongly condemn the release of this information. Our campaign was aware of this information several months ago, and made a very determined decision to not use or disperse this information in any way, shape, or form. I specifically instructed the few members of my campaign team who knew of this situation to not disseminate this information, engage in negative, personal attack campaigning, even though my opponent had already done so. This type of negative campaigning is exactly what is wrong with politics today. While these revelations are indeed alarming, my heart goes out to Amy and her family. My wife Viktoriya and I will continue to pray for her.
With “condemnation” like that, who needs friends.
Amy Biviano, herself, released a statement expressing how there was not even an attempt by her campaign to hide her pictorial in Playboy “Women of the Ivy League” in October 1995. Biviano, like most people of the 21st century, believes that nude pictures have nothing to do with the challenges facing Washington state’s 4th district.
