Sex Redux 

David Begelman

Something is in the air over sex these days, to be sure. But was it any different in yesteryear? After all, where would Western civilization be without its hoary preoccupation—some would say obsession—with sex? The subject is not for the faint-hearted; the seamy fissures of humanity extend far and wide. Depredations of sex are—how shall we put it?—ecumenical in their embrace. What other kind of scandal could bring that mighty edifice, the Catholic Church, to its knees? The very air has become suffused with intimations of schism over priestly pedophilia and institutional cover-up. Legions of parishioners are out for a hanging, and the demon keeps rearing its head in unlikely precincts of sacred terrain. We have been forced to revise our collective wisdom about who is at risk.

Of course, a certain constituency would have you believe that the blight made its presidential debut in the Clinton White House, and with a chief executive awash in depravity vaguely reminiscent of scenes from The Bacchae by Euripides. Hardly.

Those who pretend to be shocked by Bill Clinton’s behavior would do well to familiarize themselves with American history. And right-wingers should own up to being afflicted like everyone else, as the peccadilloes of Wendell Willkie, Bob Livingston, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, Henry Hyde, Dick Armey, Helen Chenoweth, Bob Dole, Rudy Giuliani, and Clarence Thomas attest, not to mention numerous other Larry Flynt-ed icons of the right. As any historian of these matters knows full well, Flynt has no claim to originality. The politics of sleaze and character assassination was pioneered by Lee Atwater, a G.O.P. operative, long before the disabled editor of porn joined the fray.

Atwater’s school of politics subsequently boomeranged throughout the Commonwealth as scales were made to drop from the eyes of citizenry who thought that “family values” corresponded to a palpitating reality in the lives of politicians who revere God and Country, detest national health insurance, trial lawyers, labor unions, the NEA, filibusters impeding the nomination of favored judicial nominees, Howard Dean, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, and all uppity women who are probably lesbians anyhow.

Representative Dan Burton, the politician who decorously designated Clinton a “scumbag” was perched on considerably lower than the high moral ground when he finally admitted fathering a child out of wedlock after having an extra-marital affair. Rumor has it that Burton’s gropings, especially in connection with women on his payroll like Claudia Keller, had a decidedly Clintonian coloration. Pots often call kettles black.

Ann Coulter, a lawyer and talking head Rush Limbaugh has dubbed “a pundit extraordinaire” has averred in Slander, her best-seller, that the Clinton administration was “far more scandalous” than Nixon’s! (Not about sex, the conservatives intone, but lying, perjury, and obstruction of justice—despite the fact that Nixon continually obstructed justice, suborned perjury right and left, and lied through his teeth about Watergate, not to mention earnings on his income tax return, as uncontroversial a case of perjury as can be designated in law.) Coulter avers that the existence of a “religious right” political constituency in America is a fiction perpetrated on us by the liberal media. Some pundit.  

The cauldron of filthy loves not only boils over all about us, as St. Augustine once observed; it is democratic in its compass. The brilliant Church father (who, like Dan Burton, also fathered a child out of wedlock, only at the age of seventeen) deemed sex to be overpowering, irresistible, as did his Victorian copycat, Sigmund Freud. As for the latter’s high-minded standing in the eyes of his fanatical devotees, scholars have marshaled evidence the father of psychoanalysis, when he was not falsifying the record by contriving to make posterity believe that the narratives in certain of his case studies pertained to the lives of patients, rather than his own, had an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, while the two were on vacation together. Some bourgeois physician of “flawless integrity.”

St. Augustine felt that the proper prophylactic for sexuality was the sacrament of marriage, although he had no illusions about the untamable urge. Marital sex was for him likewise encumbered by Original Sin; only it had the dubious advantage of confining raunchiness to a more restricted playing field.

Congressional corridors are not above lapses akin to steamy Carthaginian nights of the fifth century, as depicted in the saint’s Confessions. Henry Hyde, that white-haired eminence of Republican rectitude, was himself involved in a five-year adulterous affair with a married woman while in his forties. He refers to his escapade as a “youthful indiscretion,” prompting us to wonder whether the chief excess on Capitol Hill is sexual impropriety or euphemism.

John Ashcroft, our former pious Attorney General, proposed draping the semi-clad statues of women decorating congressional halls, lest legislators harbor salacious thoughts while doing their elected duty—meaning, I gather, giving a new boost to the idea of big government. The latter surfaces again when it comes to gay marriage bashing, federal spending, homeland security, suicide in Oregon, detention in prison without access to lawyers for American citizens defined by federales on free-wheeling semantic rampages to be “enemy combatants,” reinterpreting the Second Amendment, and purifying the Commonwealth in time for the Second Coming. Taming the nagging urge is transparently futile. Given the propensity sexual arousal has for sudden fits and starts, a legislator might, for all we know, go carnal at the sight of a curved mahogany bench. He doesn’t need a nude statue for inspiration, much less raging hormones.

 Even immersion in the scriptures can be a chancy affair for the overly pious. They would do well to become selectively dyslexic when it comes to the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament. Those passages make nude Congressional statues seem like tales out of a McGuffey’s Reader.

As for former notables, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, Johnson, Hamilton, and Jefferson, all seemed to have succumbed to the blight. Future historians under the spell of this latest gloss on what makes the world go round will duly note how the icons went down like bowling pins after contagion.

James Madison, before his marriage to Dolly, tried to hit on a girl of fourteen. Abraham Lincoln, in order to keep his imagined condition secret, journeyed to Ohio from Springfield, Illinois, to undergo private mercury treatments for an imagined syphilis, a remedy that might have been a possible cause of his variable moodiness. (The source was his closest confidant, William Herndon.)

 Alexander Hamilton, the distinguished colonial Federalist, confessed to a dalliance with a married woman, Maria Reynolds, while his wife and children were away in 1792. Hamilton managed to convince a group of politicians including the future president-elect James Monroe to keep the affair secret. They attempted to comply until one of their group, a blabbermouth by the name of John Beckley, blew Hamilton’s cover by telling tales out of school to the notorious whistle-blower, James Callender.

According to the latest DNA studies—not to mention James Callender—Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most brilliant political mind the nation has produced, was sexually involved with a black slave he owned, Sally Hemmings. The liason between a patrician and servant property would appear to make the Clinton-Lewinsky revelries in the Oval Office a triumph of free enterprise by comparison.

Some say the DNA studies come under a cloud. The Jefferson scholar Dumas Malone averred, “no gentleman in the antebellum South would ever go to bed with a slave.” (As obvious a tautology if ever there was, given that the practice was as vintage Confederacy as southern drawls, white sheets, and lynching, while no one who indulged—there were droves of honky landowners who did—could be pronounced a gentleman.) Are we to believe that fair-skinned blacks or mulattos of the south got their complexions because of the bleaching effect of the sun while, indentured to the hilt, they toiled away in cotton fields?

Willard Sterne Randall in Thomas Jefferson: A Life cannot bring himself to believe that Jefferson could cavort with “even the most beautiful adolescent slave girl.” Randall feels that the socially prominent Maria Cosway had Jefferson’s heart. Get real, Willard. Life on the presidential level, contrary to sentimentalized versions of it spoon-fed to middle-schoolers, is not always like a storybook ballet, as choreographed by Marius Petipa. Besides, Maria Cosway, like Maria Reynolds, was a married woman.

When the juices start pumping, anything can happen in the lives of great men—and often does. If we are all of us tainted with Original Sin, as many theologians interpret the Good Book to be preaching, why all the feigned surprise when great ones are among the fallen sparrows? To be as charitable as possible to those in the throes of the universal scourge, they can’t be expected to take cold showers all the time.