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Sex and the Civitas

Herman Cain says the Democrats are plotting to destroy him by accusing him of unsavory sexual activities so that they can get to Newt Gingrich and accuse him of unsavory sexual activities.  


I guess.  Unless Herman has been taking Gary Hart lessons.  It was Gary Hart who put to rest charges that he was unfaithful to his wife by saying something like, "Prove it!  Follow me!"  They did.  He was.  


Clearly, this is not a Democratic scheme to discredit Republican candidates.  Democrats are not complex enough to have arranged Herman and Newt's lives the way they have done, or even to figure out how to tell the story.  


Is there anything sadder than hearing about the sex lives of celebrities?  If you do not know the answer to that, read about Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries:  what is a seventy-day marriage like between a seven-foot basketball player and a plastic woman?


It is as if the news media just discovered that people have sex with each other, and that not all sexual activity is limited to,  "I do", I did, and I died.  Of course some sexual activity is destructive!  So is some food, and some medicine.  People do ordinary, and not-so-ordinary things.  Some of them are stupid.  Some are perverse.  Some are really very nice.


The notion that people have to prove that they have the sexual fidelity of swans, who are reputed to practice absolute fidelity to each other (which sounds, frankly, unlikely to me), or they cannot hold public office is absurd.  It is as silly as a cohort of celibates, with a reputation for buggering little boys, insisting that women follow the rules they make.  Culturally and religiously, we hold out the ideal of everlasting marriage and perfect fidelity.  It doesn't happen very often.  Some marriages ought not to last:  they are destructive.  (See:  Kardashian and Humphries)  


It would be nice to suggest that people's sex lives ought to be their own business, unless it harms other people.  Maybe then, it might disqualify one for public office, or for the priesthood.  But we know that life is not that neat.  


What really frosts people is hypocrisy.  "I am not having an affair!", Gary Hart said, "Follow me and you will see!"  They followed him.  Her name was. . . .  No, her name isn't important, any longer.  Herman Cain says, "No time!  No way!  Never!  Ever!"  Then the women got into line and started talking.  Newt tries to disarm us by saying that he was a naughty boy, but that he has changed.  Now he is a Catholic, happily married to Tiffany's, and that Bill Clinton was a cad!  


It isn't just Gary Hart and Herman and Newt.  It is the insistence of the religious Right and the political Right that they want to control bedroom activity.  They want to specify who can get family planning advice, who should or should not pay for it, who and how one may get pregnant, what to do is the pregnancy threatens the mother's life, etc.  They are not so interested in what happens to the children who survive their regulations.  


We hate being lied to.  (See:  Gary Hart, and maybe Herman Cain)  We hate pretense.  (See:  Newt)  But maybe they lie and pretend--at least partly--because we are too nosy.  We ought to admit that.  If they are lying and pretending because they are liars and pretenders, then they probably ought not to be elected to represent our best interests.  


And I cannot figure out how to best distinguish those things.  

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