Vitter's ‘sin’ met with yawn. Are we growing up?

Brian Alexander • E-mail

And so we have another Washington, D.C., sex scandal and the blogs on both sides of the ideological spectrum (there being no middle in the blogosphere) are shooting broadsides back and forth. The liberals are guffawing at the obvious hypocrisy of Louisiana Sen. David Vitter’s (a “family values” conservative) phone number showing up in the logs of the “D.C. Madam” and his confession to “a very serious sin.”

The conservative bloggers and pundits have been hauling out that well-beaten piñata Bill Clinton and his Oval Office fellatio fest as if that were somehow relevant. (Not unlike the conservatives bleating about Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich to justify Bush’s abrogation of the judge’s sentence in the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Funny how each side points to the very behaviors they have condemned as somehow ameliorating the actions of their team.)

But outside the “gotcha world” of the blogosphere, mainstream media is pretty much letting the Vitter story die. The bloggers think this reveals the stodgy irrelevance of the media, but letting the story die is a very good sign — maybe a sign we are growing up.

One does not have to condone extra-marital affairs, or visiting prostitutes — and our recent MSNBC.com survey showed unequivocally that most of us do not — to realize that many people often fail to live up to the ideals they set for themselves and others. Ideals are a vision of perfection, a goal. But many people, maybe most of us, cart around some personal desire for an indulgence we may regret later, but cannot resist right now.

The desires could be small, such as a double cheese pizza when we’re under doctor’s orders to lose weight, or they could be as large as taking out a second mortgage to purchase the Jaguar we know we should not buy. We will regret it later, but human weakness betrays us.

A marriage adds another layer of complication. No outsider can look inside a marriage and accurately deduce the sexual desires and emotional needs at play. These are too intensely private. When the Vitters say they have addressed the senator’s “sin” within their relationship and that it is between them and them alone, they are correct.

Whether or not Mrs. Vitter chose to forgive her husband is for her to decide, not us.

A very long history
The same is true for the rest of us. It does not imply approval to say that many people stumble sexually. Many of us break promises and regret breaking those promises. Whether or not to forgive is up to the people we betrayed.

For the rest of us, this is not a political issue, but a personal one. Why should it be different for a politician? Lately, though, we have insisted on turning sex into politics, as if sexual fidelity were the measure of wise leadership.

Hard to imagine now, I know, but there was a time when we were more grown up about this sort of thing. If Vitter had visited a prostitute in Washington, D.C., 100 years ago, his actions would have been perfectly legal. Houses of prostitution dotted the area around the National Mall until they were banned in 1914. If a senator visited a hooker back then, it was a matter for himself, the hooker, the madam and the guy’s wife.

Unsanctioned sex and political figures have a very long history in our country. There was Thomas Jefferson and the slave Sally Hemmings, and Benjamin Franklin’s sexual adventures both here and in France. Grover Cleveland, a paragon of rectitude in office who helped stymie the corrupt Tammany Hall machine in New York, admitted to fathering a child to a woman not his wife. Even though Republicans tried to make hay of the fact with the campaign chant “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” he was elected president.

Warren Harding was famous for his paramours. Franklin Roosevelt had a recurring affair with his wife’s secretary. John F. Kennedy had an affair with a young intern, among others.

Can you imagine our history without these men if they had been blackballed from engaging in the nation’s political life because of actions in their intimate lives? If we had made the private sexual habits of our officials a litmus test, we would not have had them.

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