Hypocrisy of the GOP: Congressman Tony Gonzales and Staffer Death

Let’s start with this truth: family values has been a slogan slapped on election signs, Fox News rants, and campaign mailers for decades. But the deeper you dig under the paint and gloss, the more you find it’s a brand, not a code of conduct. It’s cheap moral theater. When family values gets measured by who you criticize in a rally speech instead of how you treat real people with real vulnerability, that brand collapses.

That’s exactly what’s happening with Tony Gonzales right now. According to the San Antonio Express-News, a former staffer says that Rep. Gonzales had a romantic affair in 2024 with his regional district director, Regina Santos-Aviles, and that the relationship was an open secret among staff. A text message from Santos-Aviles confirmed she told colleagues she’d had “an affair with our boss.” The congressman has denied the claims publicly.

This situation is about more than an alleged affair. It exposes a brutal power imbalance that is baked into congressional offices everywhere. When one person holds authority over someone’s job, career prospects, and reputation, consent and choice can become murky. The boss holds the leash. That’s not theory. That’s workplace reality. For a staffer, losing a job in D.C. or in a district office isn’t just losing a paycheck. It’s losing access to networks, opportunities, and future prospects in a hyper-competitive political world.

So imagine the psychological strain if you’re a subordinate caught up in that. Now imagine it becomes public knowledge among staff and locals, but leadership does nothing. And then imagine the congressman essentially going quiet, refusing questions, brushing off concerns while his staff fractures. The former colleague interviewed by the paper said her distress deepened after her husband found out and Gonzales ended the relationship. In the months before she died, she went on antidepressants. She lost her place in the office, went from being a valued leader to someone fading out of the work environment. One month before she died, she attempted suicide. Weeks later she set herself on fire. Authorities ruled her death a suicide.

Stepping back for a minute to breathe because that last image is shocking and painful. Setting yourself on fire is extreme in every sense of the phrase. It is not something someone does lightly or on a whim. We do not have evidence of why she did it, but we do have a chain of events where she felt abandoned, powerless, and without support at a time when she desperately needed it. Even if you want to hold back from assigning direct causation, the sequence reeks of neglect - leadership neglect, crisis-management neglect, basic human dignity neglect.

Which brings me to local politics that intersect with this. In counties and towns along the border, political pressures don’t just stay at the ballot box. They shape how leaders show up when people are hurt. Mayor Chacón was trying to curry favor with the congressman during this time frame and giving the local Democratic Party the Heismann stiff arm. The conversation about the staffer's death was a topic on the lips of a lot of people in San Elizario that attended a rally in San Elizario during that time frame - a rally in which Mayor Chacón was in attendance. 

Now he’s claiming he’s team blue!

In that context, imagine the pressure on local Democrats and community leaders. A Republican congressman with influence over federal dollars and local offices gets accused of something that cuts right through the family values branding. And here’s the kicker with the family values hypocrisy: the party that shouts loudest about upright morality on cable news and in fundraising emails consistently protects powerful men in their own ranks while punishing women or lower-ranking staff. This isn’t just politics. It is decades of cultural rot where morality becomes partisan armor instead of an ethical baseline for all.

Here are the questions we should be demanding answers to:

Why was information about this relationship not handled with urgency within the office?

Why did staff feel unable to raise concerns without fear of retaliation?

What resources were offered, if any, to support Santos-Aviles before her mental health deteriorated?

And why are political allies more concerned with protecting seats and endorsements than demanding accountability from someone who purportedly betrayed both his family and his staff?

That last one matters because it shows where real family values should start - with empathy, responsibility, and the acknowledgment that political power does not absolve you of moral consequences.

What happened here is tragic. The cost was human. The cost was deep psychological anguish. And the louder the denials from GOP leadership and media echo chambers, the more we have to question how seriously family values is taken when it matters most.

We owe Regina Santos-Aviles more than platitudes about tragedy. We owe her a reckoning about how power operates in Washington and how often that power leaves the most vulnerable people behind.