A listener in Great Britain—"a straight married Scottish white man in his 40s who wouldn't miss an episode of your podcast"—wrote me last Wednesday to let me know about a brewing scandal in Northern Ireland. "I love when you rip some religious hypocrite a new one at the start of the 'Savage Lovecast,' and just in case you missed it I'm rushing to pass on details of a really lovely instance this side of the Atlantic."

David wanted to bring the sixty-something Iris Robinson to my attention. She's the wife of Mr. Peter Robinson—the man who just so happens to be the leader of the conservative Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist party. "Monarchy, God, keeping the Catholics down, that sort of thing," says David. Anyhoo: Iris is a deeply religious woman with deep, deep loathing for the gays. Just how loathsome are we? Well...

“There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing children.”

Gay sex—consensual gay sex between adults of legal age—is worse than child rape (the only thing worse!), according to Mrs. Robinson. And gay people are all anti-family, ill, perverse PREDATORS, says Mrs. Robinson, and we're a great big threat to the super sacred institution of marriage. And Mrs. Robinson knows something about the sacred institution of marriage: the sixty-something lady has been married for more than forty years... which makes her marriage more than twice as old as the teenage boy she got caught fucking.

The scandal is rocking Ireland and reviving the "Mrs. Robinson" meme. (Mrs. Robinsons are back—cougars are so 2004.) The good news for Iris? Her God has forgiven her, she says, so that's all squared away. The bad news? Her affair may bring down her husband's government and destroy the Irish peace process.

The sex scandal that has transfixed Northern Ireland in recent days has a cinematic echo: a 60-year-old Mrs. Robinson who was caught in an affair with a man who was 19 at the time, and is now at the center of a scandal that threatens to bring down the power-sharing government that has steered the province out of 30 years of sectarian bloodshed.... The revelations come at a critical time, when the mostly Protestant unionists and mostly Catholic republicans are in increasingly bitter discussions about how to put in place one of the last and most difficult pieces of the United States-brokered power-sharing agreement: the transfer of police and justice powers in the province from British officials to the unity government.

Damn. And Mrs. Robinson's boy toy? A nineteen-year-old that Mrs. Robinson set up with a cafe in what may have been an illegal kickback scheme—oh, and he's a gay icon now. "Hope you find this of interest," David wrote last Wednesday. Yeah, we Americans find it of interest—it's on every blog in the world and the front page of the New York Times. Thanks for the tip, David, wished I'd posted something about it sooner!