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THE VITTER AMENDMENT. Louisiana Senator David Vitter has come clean about once having been a client of a Washington D.C. escort service:
"This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible," Vitter said Monday in a printed statement. "Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there _ with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way."
I don't usually write about politicians' private lives or family members as those are none of my business. So why the deviation from that rule in this post? Because of the policies Senator Vitter has supported. He is a fervent defender of the traditional marriage and also an advocate of abstinence-only policies. Indeed, his homepage states:
U.S. Sen. David Vitter last week authored a letter to the chairman and ranking member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee expressing support for reauthorization of the Title V Abstinence Education Program of the Social Security Act.
Taken together, Vitter's support for abstinence outside marriage and his defense of the traditional heterosexual marriage might mean that gays and lesbians in his ideal world would have to practice life-long celibacy. To expect that of others and yet to fail (most likely more than once) with the much smaller challenge of marital fidelity makes Vitter into either a hypocrite or an unrealistic policy-maker. Or both.
--J. Goodrich
COMMENTS (13)
It's only hypocrisy when Dems do it. IF it should SOMEHOW happen that a Republican cheats on his wife, all he has to do is say that God has forgiven him, and Ma and Pa Amurrika will say, "That's good enough for us!"
Works every time.
Posted by: Dean Keeton | July 10, 2007 11:09 AM
I think it's fine to give people a pass on their peccadilloes, but only if their behavior has no bearing on policy.
The scandal about Senator Vitter and previous escort customer Randall Tobias is not that they were married men hiring escorts. The scandal is that they were unable to conform to abstinence-only, anti-prostitution, and anti-infidelity policies even though they were knowledgeable about and responsible for *implementing those policies!*
If abstinence-only policies don't work for Vitters or Tobias then they're bad policies! *That's* the scandal. And *that's* where it's not just appropriate but pretty responsible for the non-yellow press to dig it out.
Bottom line: if one thinks this is a *sex* scandal yeah, one probably shouldn't write about it because generally one would be missing the *real* scandal.
figleaf (who blogs regularly about sex and politics.)
Posted by: figleaf | July 10, 2007 11:32 AM
I think it's fine to give people a pass on their peccadilloes, but only if their behavior has no bearing on policy.
The scandal about Senator Vitter and previous escort customer Randall Tobias is not that they were married men hiring escorts. The scandal is that they were unable to conform to abstinence-only, anti-prostitution, and anti-infidelity policies even though they were knowledgeable about and responsible for *implementing those policies!*
If abstinence-only policies don't work for Vitters or Tobias then they're bad policies! *That's* the scandal. And *that's* where it's not just appropriate but pretty responsible for the non-yellow press to dig it out.
Bottom line: if one thinks this is a *sex* scandal yeah, one probably shouldn't write about it because generally one would be missing the *real* scandal.
figleaf (who blogs regularly about sex and politics.)
Posted by: figleaf | July 10, 2007 11:32 AM
Hypocrite? Unrealistic policy-maker? Maybe both?
I vote for both and would add a third: a self-righteous prig who thinks he has the right to tell other people how to live their lives.
The Republican Party (and especially the Christian right) is chockablock with Vitters.
Posted by: Gerald Scorse | July 10, 2007 12:19 PM
Well, I agree that it's hypocritical.
But the community that he professes to be of, thinks that the important point is to maintain normative standards, from which individuals, being human, will inevitably fall. That's why he calls it sin. But the sinner's fall doesn't undermine the normative standard.
Their complaint against "liberals" is that they think liberals think because people fall away from normative standards that means you chuck the standards. This doesn't work for them because they think it means it we will all just slop around in the mud.
Maybe we will, because that's the easy thing to do.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 10, 2007 2:15 PM
It seems to me that the right wing social conservatives are not opposed to out-of-marriage sex or to homosexuality as long as the practitioner is deeply shameful. The sin is not the sin; the sin is not considering their sin to be your sin...or something like that.
Posted by: winer | July 10, 2007 4:38 PM
Vitter, like most conservatives, is a sexually repressed slut.
Posted by: Chris Tharrington | July 10, 2007 9:46 PM
Kudos to Mr. or Ms Anonymous above for succinctly, insightfully, and accurately assessing the situation. That's why all the metrosexual Leninist adulterers here are afraid to challenge or even acknowledge him or her.
Posted by: Mackie Messer | July 11, 2007 2:24 AM
"Their complaint against 'liberals' is that they think liberals think because people fall away from normative standards that means you chuck the standards."
Maybe they think so, but that doesn't make it so. There are plenty of liberals (myself included) who believe that "normative standards", when it comes to sexual behavior, are innately private and personal; they are nobody's business but your own. They absolutely do *not* believe in "chucking the standards"; they absolutely do believe that those standards are not imposed by others.
Posted by: Gerald Scorse | July 11, 2007 10:59 AM
Follow the money! The issue isn't sex, it's who paid and who got what in return. I do not know either Tobias or Vitter, but I have spent a lot of time around politicians and none of them paid for the type of expensive services they got, whether it was tickets to sporting events, broadway musicals, lunches and diners at expensive restaurants, or "fishing rodeos - with a side helping of prostitutes, the services of the DC or Canal Street madams, or the like. And, there is always a favor in return.
Posted by: Salmo | July 11, 2007 11:23 AM
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Posted by: vapch snxy | July 12, 2007 4:12 PM
So what if Vitters screws around. He's a "family values homophobe" who still thinks we'll find the WMD's.
Posted by: Jim Saunders | July 17, 2007 1:41 AM