1 Boring Old Man

I couldn’t help posting the Ensign quotes, but I sort of wanted to stay out of the scandal mode. We’ve had more than enough of that recently – Foley, Craig, Vitter, Spitzer, Ensign., ya-da ya-da. Political porn is kind of a yawner. But reading snips throughout the day suggests that this story is more complicated than some. The families [Ensigns and Hamptons] were friends. Ensign employed them both and their 19 year old. Ensign and his wife were separated during the affair. The Haptons bought a million dollar home. There was crooked stuff with the RNC finances. Ensign went missing in 2000 for several weeks, a previous affair? Was there blackmail by Cynthia Hampton’s husband? A lot of messy stuff suggesting some kind of wierdness involved. And where are the Hamptons? There are apparently absolutely no pictures of the Hamptons on the Internet – suggesting that they knew about Ensign’s going public in advance and scrubbed things.

Senator John Ensign is a Religious Right Conservative who supports a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as a monogomous heterosexual union. He’s a member of Promise Keepers®, a religious men’s fellowship devoted to marital fidelity. It’s reminescent of Ted Haggard, president of the country’s evangelical christians having periodic drug enhanced sex with a male prostitute. Or maybe even like Governor Elliot Spitzer, former Attorney General of New York who was on a campaign to stomp out prostitution rings, yet was one of their regular Johns. Or, of course, Larry Craig – a bathroom sex guy masquarading as a Conservative Senator. And then there’s President Clinton’s famous liason with Monica Lowensky.

Is all of this really out of the ordinary, or an artifact of their public positions. Statistics are shaky in this area because it involves reporting, but most people give 60% of married men and 40% of married women have some kind of affair along the way. With those kind of figures, what we see in public life seems to be pretty much par for the course. But what it says about the current ravings about marriage is pretty clear – it’s mostly a way to garner votes. And who is it that really cares about homosexuals marrying? I doubt anyone stays up at night thinking about that very much. It  seems to me that it’s about something else – something about wanting to live in an idealized homogeneous society – like on Father Knows Best or The Donna Reed Show in the 1950’s – shows that wouldn’t even last a whole season now.

Somewhere, in some idealized future, society is going to figure out what it has the right to demand from all of us [laws] and what it doesn’t [morality]. Senator Ensign didn’t break a law [that we yet know of]. He broke a promise – maybe more than one. The real question about him is why didn’t his own experience influence and inform his political life. The reason to drum him out of politics is not his own "immorality," it’s his using elective office to impose a morality that he obviously doesn’t follow on others, and using that feigned morality to get votes.