Why the GOP sex scandals matter

This may come as a shock, but the avalanche of Republican sex scandals is not something I particularly like seeing. Really, no one should. Watching someone’s personal life laid bare for the world to mock and tear apart, plus the havoc it wreaks on their generally innocent family members, is not that much fun.

However, it should serve to remind us that the “common wisdom” in American politics that Republicans stand for strong, stout moral values while Democrats stand for hedonism is an artificial categorization with nothing in reality to prop it up.

Affairs happen, people are imperfect. As George Carlin once said, “you’re all diseased.” It’s an absolute shame and represents a downright terrible failure of judgment, but it does happen and fairly often. I do not believe there is one person that saw of these stories who was not closely affected by infidelity in some manner, be it their own relationship or that of a relative or close friend.

When affairs happen in the political sphere, agendas start to get pushed, and as always it’s a terribly uneven situation. Will showed me a comic (no, I won’t put it up here) that showed a donkey and an elephant jumping over hurdles labeled “moral values”. The donkey’s was much lower, the elephant’s much higher, and as the elephant hit his, the donkey yelled “hypocrite!” while nimbly hopping over his low one. This, in a nutshell, exemplifies all that is wrong with moral crusading in politics.

The point is that when a John Edwards situation comes about, Republicans use that prove that Democrats are lacking in ethics, morally bankrupt heathens that don’t care about families. They attempt to say that these situations are a direct result of Democratic principles. Meanwhile, when a Vitter or Ensign happens, they attempt to say that this is an aberration, while Democrats point out that this is proof that Republicans are not the “champions of traditional family values”.

That’s the real crux of the matter here. It isn’t that this party or that party is inherently predisposed to moral failings, but rather that the opposite is true. Consider that at least four high-profile Republicans that we’ve seen (Gingrich, Ensign, Sanford, Craig) were all incredibly vocal about Clinton’s scandal and how reprehensible it was. In Newt’s case, he was in fact having an affair at the same time he was publicly condemning Clinton over it. The very people pushing for the image of “moral crusader” were privately breaking their own code.

Republicans often like to paint themselves as the white picket fence party that goes to church on Sundays and drives their kids to soccer practice, while Democrats are too busy gay marrying and burning Bibles to worry about their kids that they wanted to abort anyway. The false dichotomy is that one side is pure and cares about family values, and one side is not and does not. There’s no reason to believe any of this is true.

Pinned into a corner, the Republicans attempt to twist the situation around, accusing their critics of hypocrisy by asking why they’re making such a big deal of it at all. This is what happened especially during the Larry Craig situation, and to a lesser extent during the Mark Foley fiasco. As the argument goes, why do you care so much if Craig or Foley are gay? Don’t you people support gays? You’re just engaging in political sniping!

Well, no, and here’s why. I’ll even put it in bold for you. If I see you eating a hamburger, I don’t care. However, if they day before you were at a vegan rally wearing a “Meat is Murder!” t-shirt and calling for McDonald’s to be shut down, now we have a situation.

Republicans are the equivalent of a whole group of vegan activists trying to call us all hypocrites when we call them out for chomping down steaks. Made worse still when the most vocal members are the ones getting caught in the alleys. Yes, Democrats had John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer. No one’s denying that. The difference being that neither Edwards nor Spitzer spent their years howling about immorality infiltrating our nation thanks to other politicians, and Democrats were swift to say “these guys screwed up, it was their failure, perhaps they ought step aside now.”

This isn’t an article intended to play a game of “who’s worse” where we list off all of the various affairs and scandals of one party and line them up against the other. The point isn’t that they’ve happened, the point is the situation surrounding them. One party in the United States frequently invokes God and talk of traditional values, pleading for us to think of our children and that they be given a strong, stable moral environment. You would think that the party doing this would be one immune to such clearly immoral acts, yet that’s not the case at all.

The take-home here is that this whole frenzy of Goppers getting caught with their pants down should dispel the myth that the Republican party is, simply by its own nature, the purveyor of stout moral fiber. Voting red does not mean voting for the family, nor does any of this mean the Republican Party is inherently not for family values. What we’re seeing is simply that there is a hell of a lot more to the notion of “family values” than your stance on abortion, gay marriage, and prayer in school.

It should strike many as interesting that quite a significant chunk of those who would prefer Bibles interwoven into our educational system and gay marriage federally banned are people who are rather morally bankrupt in their own lives. Meanwhile, the nation’s only openly atheist Congressman, Pete Stark, is a happily married man with seven children and eight grandchildren.