JOHN BRUMMETT: Confessions of another moralizer

Those leading conservatives paid for extramarital sex while those leading liberals, so far as we know or are given to suspect, engaged in it free of charge.

This could mean several things, including, one supposes, that leading conservatives, or at least those cited here, can’t land extracurriculars otherwise.

Perhaps conservatives tend to be less responsible with money, as their borrow-and-spend fiscal policies might attest.

It also could be that leading conservatives, beset by strict moral standards they espouse but are loath to meet, tend to be too ashamed and hung-up to engage other than underground in extramarital relations. Maybe one has a toe fetish, which is not an everyday taste. Maybe another likes his entanglements with persons of his own gender, though he preaches against it.

There’s no maybe to either of those, actually. Morris had the toe interest. The Rev. Haggard railed on Sundays from a Colorado megachurch’s stage against homosexuality, then proceeded to pay a guy in Denver for something that caused Haggard to confess to unspecified immorality. The guy in Denver said it was the same thing Clinton engaged in for free with Monica Lewinsky that Clinton insisted wasn’t sex.

It could be that some leading conservatives devalue their fellow women, or men, looking upon them purely as physical commodities to be used for fleshly gratification without emotional attachment or compassion. After all, George W. Bush felt obliged to assert that his conservatism was compassionate, as if routine conservatism wasn’t.

The latest prostitute solicitor on the Christian right is Vitter. He once wrote a commentary declaring Clinton "morally unfit" to be president. Because he didn’t pay, apparently.

It turns out there’s a "Washington Madam" who outed some of her clients the other day. Vitter’s name showed up from years ago, when he was a mere congressman. He confessed promptly and said that he, his wife, the Lord and a marriage counselor had worked through all this. Then the "Canal Street Madam" in New Orleans came forward to say that Vitter had visited her employees in the 1990s.

Vitter has a 100 percent voting record from a Christian-right group. He once said he represented Louisiana values, not Massachusetts ones. He may have been right. Higher divorce rates are common in red states with the most pervasive family-values rhetoric.

Vitter often has declared that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is the nation’s greatest priority. Confronted with his constituents’ suffering from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he said it just went to show why he’d always been against gay marriage. Rita. Katrina. Female names. Get it?

Fortunately for Vitter, his wife’s actions are no more consistent with her rhetoric than his own. When Vitter was accused years ago of frequenting a New Orleans prostitute, which he denied, his wife said that, if he ever did such a thing, she’d be more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary Clinton.

Having heard nothing from emergency rooms, we can assume Mrs. Vitter merely talked that easy talk and didn’t walk that tough walk. There’s a lot of that on the moralizing right these days.

 

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.