Exclusive: E-mails between Sanford, woman
Woman in affair declines interview
The State
By JOHN O’CONNORJune 24, 2009Read the full e-mail exchange in Thursday’s edition of The State.
Below are excerpts of e-mails, obtained by The State newspaper in December, between Gov. Mark Sanford’s personal e-mail account and Maria, a woman in Buenos Aires, Argentina…
This story still doesn’t quite work. He said that he was found out "five months ago." "December" minus June 24th is six months. The State newspaper has known since December? Yet their articles didn’t say anything about that. In fact The State reporter [Gina Smith] wrote a story this morning [Sanford met in Atlanta after returning from South America] about meeting the Governor as he got off a plane from Argentina that passed on his blather about an adventure trip, quoting him as saying, "I don’t know how this thing got blown out of proportion." It’s not like the emails in this article aren’t clear as a bell:
You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself [or two magnificent parts of yourself] in the faded glow of the night’s light – but hey, that would be going into sexual details…
And then there’s this C Street business – C Street, The Family, The Fellowship, Jesus First – some kind of special Christian Congressmen thing with Bible Study, a boarding house, and two big time philanderers in a couple of weeks – John Ensign and Mark Sanford. I guess it’s an agápÄ“ kind of society. Whatever all of this is about, it’s hard not to see it all as a remarkable bit of hypocrisy from some of the Republicans who have bludgeoned us with their idiosyncratic version of Christianity for the last decade.
Right now, the Internet is abuzz with sites saying that we [DFH’s][Liberals][Democrats][Progressives] are jumping on the transgressions of a few to judge the Religious Right. First, it is no longer a few. And second, our response is not so much a judgement. It’s a reaction to the extreme judgementalness of the self-righteous. Jesus covered this in the Sermon on the Mount:
| Matthew 7: | |
| 1 | Judge not, that ye be not judged. |
| 2 | For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. |
| 3 | And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? |
| 4 | Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? |
| 5 | Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. |
| 6 | ¶ Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. |
One of my favorite quotes is” He who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Jon Stewart sums it up thusly: “Well just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis.”
I haven’t watched Sanford live on tv interviews, and I don’t know much about him at all. But somehow he impresses me as less of the philandering type who covers it over with bravura moralizing, and more as a man whose buttoned-down, straight-and-narrow image was genuine — and then he fell in love with an unbuttoned-down woman, and it presented him with the possibility of a whole different emotional life.
He looks to me not just like someone who got caught with his zipper down but someone whose emotional life was shaken to the roots, and he sort of lost his mind for a while.
Like many, I was also touched by his Press Conference. But I saw it slightly differently. I thought that maybe he’d “found” his mind for a time…
Well, yes. I agree about the found instead of lost part.
Just from the transcript I read, he sounds like someone who was genuinely torn between the possibility of love and freedom and his duty. He’s been ridiculed for saying he spent 5 days in Argentina crying. I suspect that’s right.
Who knows? Maybe it wasn’t he, but she, who ended it. Maybe he went to try to win her back and couldn’t.