The D. C. Madam’s Public Service

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/14/2537/

The D. C. Madam’s Public Service
by Allan J. Lichtman

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In 2004, Vitter won election as the first Republican Senator from Louisiana in 120 years. He featured pro-family ads with his wife and children, called upon voters to stand up for “Louisiana values, not Massachusetts’s values,” and secured 76 percent of voters who cared most about moral issues. “We met Vitter, the dad who knows that it’s family that really matters, not whether we are Republicans or Democrats,” wrote Times-Picayune columnist James Gill.

Vitter’s exposure comes hard on the heels of a recent scandal engulfing Rev. Ted Haggard, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of America’s oldest and most respected Christian Right groups. Haggard, also an outspoken opponent of abortion and gay marriage, resigned his presidency and ministry and entered long-term rehabilitation amid allegations that he had purchased drugs and the services of a male prostitute.

Vitter-style hypocrisy, however, extends deeply into the history of America’s modern Right. Charles Lindbergh, the spokesman for America First in the 1940s secretly fathered a second family in Germany, unknown to his American wife and six children. Strom Thurmond, who campaigned for president in 1948 to preserve “the racial integrity and purity of the White race,” concealed a mixed-race daughter for 75 years. Oil magnate H. L. Hunt, who spent millions to propagate Christian conservatism in the 1950s, was a gambler and multiple bigamist.

Terry Dolan, founder in the 1970s of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which joined the anti-gay fund-raising frenzy with a letter warning “our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement,” was a closeted homosexual. Here in Maryland, conservative Representative Robert Bauman was arrested in 1980 for soliciting sex from a 16 year-old boy.

Vitter did not deny that he indulged in the D. C. Madam’s juicy services. Rather, as shown above, he apologized and reported forgiveness from God and his family. He said that he will respect his family and keep the matter private. Fair enough, although you’ve got to wonder about a guy with the hubris to say he not only asked God for forgiveness but actually received forgiveness.

The bigger question is whether he is now willing to say that our choice of marriage partners or our reproductive decisions should be private matters between us, our family, and our God? Will he now propose that we now teach our children, not just abstinence, but safe sexual practice? It’s time for politicians to extend to others the tolerance and privacy they reserve for themselves.