Adultery: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford

Adultery: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford

Just gave his press conference about his ongoing affair with a woman from Argentina. He said that he had been in counseling with clergy about the matter for the last 5 months. His wife already knew about it and he said they were trying to work it out. More to the purpose of this blog, he spoke a lot about the laws of God. He said, “the laws of God are not oppressive rules”, but “are always put into place for our own protection”. He also said that the laws of God were absolutes and that he had been attending Christian bible studies. Any of that relevant?

So lets’ get to a few specifics… should he resign as the Governor of South Carolina because he has been committing adultery? No. Why not? I think the more pressing question would be why should he? Is there a standing law in the state of South Carolina that people caught committing adultery should quit their jobs? What about special ones for elected officials? What he has shown is that he should not have been elected, but elected he was, and there really isn’t any legal basis for either quitting or being fired. What about the moral basis? Well what kind of moral basis do we need for people to quit their jobs? Is there some public standard for that kind of thing? I’d like to see the list. “If people do A, B, or C they should quit their jobs”. I’d like to see that. What about the extreme indignity and betrayal to the people that elected him, especially since he ran as a Republican and Republicans are known for being moral and upstanding citizens? If the people of that elected him wanted to force people out of office for this kind of thing they should have said so before they hired him, and those of you that think the Republicans are known for being moral or upstanding citizens are out of touch with reality. Sexual immorality is no more common with Democrats than with Republicans; they are all together politicians and generally untrustworthy types of folk. (Since Libertarians define themselves by their God given right to sexual immorality I guess they are in their own category here.)

So should we elect people to public office that are sexually immoral? No. Of course not. Being sexually immoral is not a special category of immorality and should be taken as general representation of the person’s personal character as a whole. It is an expression of the basic commitments to which they hold and how they interpret themselves and other people. It also says a lot about how they view pleasure and what they are willing to do to enjoy themselves. More than this, if they are willing to harm myriad other persons in order to pursue their own desires what does it say about their character in general? There is nothing that is more indicative of a person’s thinking about human relationships than their sexuality, and that is why when men cheat on their wives, or visa versa, they are telling you that their most powerful commitments are compromise-able and easily cast aside, and that, for almost nothing.

So we have all kinds of reasons to not take as friends, or ministers, or elect as office holders, or hire as employees, or work for, sexually immoral people. They have already telegraphed what they are about on a most intimate level. I know it’s horribly provincial and unfashionable to say that sexual immorality is one of the most immoral things that a person can do, with the greatest negative effects upon the self and the society, but I can say it because I am not running for office.

An example of the effects of sexual immorality upon the larger society…

A man cheats on his wife with another man’s wife; the other woman gets pregnant; She then must decide whether or not to kill the child through abortion; the husband of the pregnant woman finds out and commits himself to revenge against the adulterous man through violence; The adulterer’s wife finds out from the offended husband and sues for divorce fighting in court for sole custody of their four children ages 3 to 16 who now are subjected to public shame and humiliation not to mention being torn away from the safety and care of a nuclear family; The grandparents are immediately estranged from the children as they are required to take sides with their sons and daughters; Grades plummet; The teenagers begin the usual divorce trauma process of sexual and drug experimentation; The pregnant woman decides to have the child as she is opposed to abortion and is put out of the home by her offended husband; She sues for child support from the father of the child so that she can have a bare subsistence; He denies the child is his own not from spite but because his alimony payments to his ex-wife and child support payments for his other four children have already left him bankrupt while living in a studio apartment and still making court ordered house payments on the home where his ex-wife, her new boy-friend, and three of his four children live, the oldest having run away to avoid abuse by the new live in boy-friend; The courts decide against the adulterous woman as the legal assumption is that any married woman’s pregnancy is caused by her husband and so her now ex-husband is assumed to be the father by law and her claim for child support is denied; She does the only thing that she thinks she can do and files for child support from her ex-husband whom she knows is not the father of the child; The court finds in her favor and attaches the ex-husbands wages causing him to go into bankruptcy and flee the state in order to avoid paying child support for the child of his ex-wife’s lover; Before leaving the state he and two of his friends exact vengeance upon the adulterous man beating him severely with tire irons and leaving him hospitalized for months; Since he can no longer afford coverage his bills are covered by Medicare, Medicaid, public assistance, and what is not covered is sent to his ex-wife’s address in the form of a bill for $137,000.00; The adulterous woman raising the child alone takes to a combination of prescription medication and alcohol just to be able to emotionally function as now that she has no money and is raising a child alone men no longer find her attractive for more that a few days; The ex-husband of the adulterous woman is arrested at the state line by the highway patrol and sentenced to 2 years in state prison after a plea down to battery from attempted murder; and then things just go on from there…

Really this kind of thing should be regulated by law. The things that have the greatest negative effect on the society are the things that the laws should regulate. There is nothing with more severe or long lasting effects than sexual immorality, specifically, adultery. If there were laws against this kind of thing the situation involving Governor Sanford, President Clinton, and whomever else would be a done deal, but as there are no laws against this kind of thing in mature and socially sophisticated cultures like ours, we just let it be.

I’m not trying to “pass judgement” upon Mark Sanford or anyone else. I’m just saying that nobody has a right to complain because we as a community have said yes to adultery. We have embraced it, we have justified it, and we have made room for it as an acceptable and irremediable part of our social behavior, so stop complaining. If you really thought it was wrong you would be shocked by the irrationality of no-fault divorce and astounded by the idea of decriminalization, but as it is, we indulge it, and as we indulge it, we should expect it and every ounce of human suffering there associated. We’ve been suborning adultery for years.

Neiswonger