Skip to main content

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.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more