Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: David-Vitter

  • Edwards: Is Marital Fidelity Strictly Personal?

    I have posted before on the sex scandals involving Larry Craig and David Vitter. Now with the admission of infidelity by John Edwards, we have yet another sex scandal.

    One response, as is often the case with marital infidelity, is to claim that this is strictly a personal issue, one between him and his wife. And the spouse is certainly the primary person who is wronged. If John Edwards (or David Vitter or Larry Craig before him) were private individuals, their deeds would be a private matter to be settled privately. (One must note that unlike Edwards, so far as I know, both Craig and Vitter violated laws, while Edwards violated only his marriage vows.)

    But Edwards is a public person, who has sought public office multiple times. He does not claim that marriage vows are temporary or optional. In public he portrays a family man. I don’t think infidelity in that case is strictly personal. Whether or not one fulfills one’s vows is of paramount importance in judging integrity.

    I have certain standards for sexual morality. I claim to be moderate, am regularly called liberal, but my personal standards are rather old fashioned. I believe in marital faithfulness. I don’t believe in pre-marital sex. If I violate those standards it should (and doubtless would) have an impact on the way people regard me as a Christian teacher and leader in my church.

    But both in and outside of the church we seem to have accepted a curiously bipolar attitude toward sexual sins. On the one hand we are scandalized and yell and scream about them a great deal. On the other, we excuse them in practice. I can find few people in churches, for example, who will say they believe that premarital or extramarital sex is OK, but when it is practiced, the consequences are quite limited unless the person is a very public figure.

    It seems as thought we know it’s wrong, but we also know that we are weak, and think “there but for the grace of God go I.” This is similar to early problems in dealing with drunk driving. Police, judges, and juries so often knew that they were guilty of the same thing from time to time, and were aware that they might just as well have been the defendant, so they went easy on what was regarded as a human weakness. Mothers Against Drunk Driving waged quite a campaign to make driving under the influence a truly shameful deed before it was treated as seriously as it deserved. (You’ll still find some cases where good old boys let one another off on this one.)

    Marital infidelity, of course, doesn’t kill as many people as does driving under the influence. But when one gets married, one does make a commitment, and normally that commitment is for life. If you can make a commitment “until death do us part” and then casually violate it, it says something about your integrity. When you cover it up, it not only says something about your integrity, I believe it is morally corrosive. You become practiced at lying.

    I believe that a willingness to ignore one covenant, that of marriage, is a significant factor in deciding whether the person in question will be faithful to another covenant, for example, the oath of office. Will the person who swore to be faithful to his wife, and then strayed while covering it up regard the oath to “uphold and defend the constitution of the United States” any more seriously?

    In an atmosphere where lies and half-truths are so common, it may seem very odd to make a big deal out of this one particular issue. But I would suggest that if we drop out of the search for integrity simply because so many people have failed to provide it, we will continue to enable our politicians to become less and less honest with us.

    I do not believe marital fidelity is strictly personal when it is committed by a person seeking the trust of others. Violation of a lifetime vow is a very bad indicator of personal integrity.

    PS: I commend the mainstream media for waiting for confirmation on this one. I rarely find them commendable, but they did much better than average here.

    Crossposted to RedBlueChristian.com.

  • Eliot Spitzer Should Resign

    . . . oh, he did.

    I was a little slow on posting on this, but as I have said about David Vitter and Larry Craig, public officials who fail to live up to their publicly proclaimed standards should not be trusted with their public office. All of these men failed to do so. Craig and Vitter seem to be surviving for the moment. Spitzer has resigned, which I regard as a good thing.

    While I am an advocate of grace as a Christian, I also think that we should expect a high standard on the part of our leaders. If they cannot maintain that standard, they should be removed from such offices. There are people of integrity who can lead. We as voters should not be satisfied until we get them in office.

  • Suggest BOTH of them Resign

    Senator [tag]Larry Craig[/tag] says he won’t resign even though his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea failed. It seems that some Republicans are afraid that if they urge Senator Craig to resign, it will appear that they are discriminating–what about Senator [tag]David Vitter[/tag]?

    The Idaho Republican’s decision gives his GOP colleagues two unpleasant choices. They can resume pressuring him to leave, and risk being seen as disloyal politicians who go harder on alleged homosexual misdeeds than on heterosexual wrongdoings. (Source: MSNBC.com)

    Well, how about urging both senators to resign? Both engaged in behavior that they have publicly condemned and at least claim to be illegal. It seems to me that the party of family values might take a stand somewhere short of activities that are felonies.

    The other senators shouldn’t try to expel either one. Certainly one can be convicted of a misdemeanor and still serve in office. The real “term limiters” are the voters of each man’s state. But their colleagues can make it clear that their behavior and their hypocrisy are unacceptable.

  • Creation-Evolution Links 9/26/07

    Well, this is rather quick for another round, but there have been some more good posts I’d like to call attention to.

    • Aetiology has a good post and updates on the community college teacher fired apparently for calling the early chapters of Genesis a myth. I referred to this event in an earlier post
    • I found this post at The Questionable Authority very helpful in understanding fossilization and its relation to reconstructing the history of organisms. The principles are very similar to those in archeology, and make good sense to me.
    • Ed Brayton has this article on the Louisiana Family Forum to which Louisiana senator [tag]David Vitter[/tag] wants to give some of your tax money. It appears there are less savory activities than employing the services of prostitutes, such as taking your money and giving it to groups that will use it to harm your children’s education..
    • A post from Florida Citizens for Science reports that Cheri Yecke is in the top three for the Florida Education commissioner job. I have blogged previously on why she should not be selected.

  • Larry Craig and Accountability

    I regard [tag]accountability[/tag] as an extremely important, even critical value. Not that it’s more fundamental than others logically, but it helps hold people to such values as they profess and as are expected of them by law and custom. If people are not expected to uphold the values they profess, then there is little point being concerned precisely what those values are.

    Senator [tag]Larry Craig[/tag], who hopefully won’t hold that title for long, has fallen afoul of this value of mine. He wanted to avoid public scrutiny, so he plead guilty. Now he wants to pretend that his pleading was improper. Is it possible that in some way a United States senator did not understand precisely what he was doing? I see two options. Either he knew what he was doing, and now he’s trying to avoid the consequences, and thus should not be a Senator because he lacks integrity, or he didn’t understand his own situation, and thus should not be a Senator because he’s too stupid.

    Having said this, I think there is a stronger reaction to Craig’s action largely because of the involvement of homosexuality, which is not fair. Senator [tag]David Vitter[/tag] has more to answer for morally, in my view, even though he has not been convicted, nor has he displayed the same level of stupidity that Craig displayed. I think much of this case doesn’t look so good from the police side. But if a U. S. Senator can’t take responsibility for his own actions who can we expect to do so?

    We are told that Senator Craig might decide not to resign if his guilty plea can be vacated (Source: MSNBC.com). I think that is ridiculous. We have a serious need for leaders with integrity. What we’re getting is loud claims and no accountability.

  • Creation-Evolution Links 9/24/07

    Here are a few links related to the creation-evolution controversy that I saw over the weekend, with only short comments.

    • Besides consorting with prostitutes and lying about it, Senator [tag]David Vitter[/Tag] of Louisiana appears to have taken up the cause of federal funding for creationists. Now we not only get to have our public school science curriculum corrupted, we get to pay those who corrupt it.
    • Some followers of convicted felon and creationist [tag]Kent Hovind[/tag] would like to prevent his videos from appearing on YouTube.
    • Case Luskin appears unable to comprehend that just because some materialists are evolutionists does not mean that all evolutionists are materialists. I know logic is tough, Casey, but give it a try. (HT: The Panda’s Thumb.)

    I’ve got a couple more, but I want to comment on them a bit more extensively.

  • Larry Craig, Family Values, and Hypocrisy

    I generally try to avoid scandal stories about celebrities, though I’m much more often tempted to read, listen, and comment when they involve political figures. Listening to the arrest interview tape of Senator Larry Craig was an interesting experience. I was immediately struck by how naive I am at age 50. None of the conversation made any sense to me. I’ll have to take other people’s word for it that this was clearly soliciting. In the end, I can’t imagine he actually plead guilty even though he was innocent. Surely a politician of his experience realized the story wouldn’t stay hidden forever.

    I want to make a few comments on the reaction. Democrats are pretty happy, of course, to see another Republican get caught with his pants down, so to speak. Republicans have a harder time defending this one, though there is clearly a willingness in congress to let things pass if they can get by with it. With the information age, such behavior becomes less and less possible, and politicians will realize that if they want to be surviving politicians.

    For many conservatives, it seems that the media reaction is the main part of the story. The media focuses in on the hypocrisy issue, and this bothers them. Surely the basic moral issue is more important. Well, from a Christian moral perspective we have several issues.

    First is that this is a married man who is engaged in infidelity. I think that fact must concern us whatever we believe about homosexuality and its compatibility with Christian faith. Yes, there are many pressures that are put on a gay man by the moral disapprobation of homosexuality, but at the same time there is the sacred vow of marriage. I would suggest that any time we choose to loudly proclaim a set of values that we are not and/or cannot live up to, we are simply asking for the pressures to build. Senator Craig set about gaining power in a subset of society that disapproved of who he was. I know he denies being gay, but at the least it seems he had some tendencies, tendencies that would not be approved by his colleagues. He put everyone around him at high risk by his behavior.

    Secondly, this isn’t directly about homosexuality. Being gay is not about seeking illicit sex in restrooms. This act is dangerous quite apart from any moral view of homosexuality. We should not view this act as any different from that of Senator David Vitter in going to a prostitute. Now there are other points about the two stories that are different, but the type of sex outside of his marriage that was sought by Senator Craig is not the main moral issue.

    Third, we all find it very easy to condemn others for sexual sins. We think sexual sins are so much dirtier than other sins. I am not here trying to define “sexual sin.” Use your own definition if you have one. But other sins such as gossip, theft, accepting bribes and so forth are just as immoral in the sight of God, and yet while we condemn the people who do them, we don’t have the “yuck” reaction that we do to sexual sin. I don’t believe God divides sins into “yucky” and “not-yucky.”

    Fourth, hypocrisy is significant. In my opinion, what Senator Craig did was wrong, irrespective of any issue of hypocrisy. (I must note that it’s hard to separate hypocrisy from this one, since we have a married man carrying out the action. One assumes he was at least hypocritical to his wife.) But I do believe that hypocrisy is another offense and adds to the list, so to speak. Thus the media are not off track in pointing to hypocrisy. If a person who has said nothing about being gay, or who is positive about gay rights comes out of the closet, there is no issue of hypocrisy. Some may still object that they believe homosexuality is wrong in itself, but no issue of hypocrisy arises. When someone has proclaimed that the “gay lifestyle” is wrong, that it is a threat to family values, and that various elements associated with it should be outlawed, and then we find out he has been engaging in those very acts all along, it’s a different matter.

    It is a matter of integrity. The voters should expect that their elected leaders are who they say they are. Then they can choose wisely. Those leaders should expect that the most serious breach of trust is for them not to be who they say they are. In politics, I think hypocrisy is one of the most serious sin–very funny, I know, considering how pervasive it is. But then I believe gossip is probably the most serious sin in the church–very funny also, considering how pervasive it is.

    So would I think Senator Craig’s behavior was OK if he just wasn’t a hypocrite? Well, this is where it’s hard to separate his act from the context. To avoid the charge of hypocrisy, he would have to announce something to the effect that he believed that seeking random sexual encounters in restrooms was OK. He’d still be stuck with the legal issue–it’s against the law, but at least he wouldn’t be a hypocrite. I would think he was unwise (would “incredibly stupid” be going too far?) as well. According to my moral beliefs, he would be morally wrong. There wouldn’t be any possibility that he would be Senator from Idaho under those circumstances.

    Let me use a simpler issue–premarital sex. Now my personal moral code, which I believe is in accord with Biblical and Christian teaching, says “no.” But I know people of generally good character, who don’t approve of random sexual partners, who nonetheless believe that a period of time living together is simply a good way to test the waters. (I’m not arguing that they are right, nor would I make the same suggestion, but these are in general very reliable people.) Now supposing I read a story about a candidate for office that says that he lived with his girlfriend for a couple of years before marrying her. How do I react? Well, if he had concealed the fact, and said such behavior was wrong, and he wanted it to be illegal (unlikely these days, eh?) then I would regard him as a hypocrite, and I would be unlikely to vote for him. The reason is that his words do not match his deeds. On the other hand, if his stated believe was that this was OK, I would still give him consideration, because his deed do match his words.

    Supposing he opposed such behavior but had confessed to his prior behavior? That would again be quite acceptable to me. As a Christian I do believe in redemption and restoration.

    Which brings up one last point–restoration of fallen leaders. I’m thinking of this mostly from a Christian perspective. I believe that a leader who has fallen into sin needs to take a substantial amount of time out of leadership, followed by serving and being faithful in small things, before being restored to leadership. (I’m not going to argue the definition of “sin” here. Use your own again!) I would neither close the door, nor would I make it a revolving door. Some of what I’ve been hearing about Ted Haggard leads me to think that some folks have a revolving door. Forgiveness is good, redemption is possible, but when we’re choosing a small number of leaders we need to make as certain as is humanly possible that we have chosen good examples.

    Having done so, we need to realize that leaders will fall. The tendency to sin is a strong Christian theme as well. That means we need to hold them accountable, and they need to seek accountability to make this kind of problem less likely to occur. The most important method of preventing sin, however, is being transparent. Any time you are pretending to be someone you are not, there will be a great possibility that the pretense will slip, and the real you will show through. If you are being the real you, that danger is removed.

    (Note: I made a number of related remarks on my wife’s devotional list here.