By Fe Bongolan

Were you fully erect?”

A reporter’s question from Rep. Anthony Weiner’s press conference, June 6, 2011

On the first day of the trial in New York’s Criminal Court of former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn for attempted rape of a hotel maid, back in Washington we had another trial of sorts. Only this time, there was no single judge or a jury and no defense for the accused. In a press conference called by his office, Congressman Anthony Weiner, one of New York’s outspoken progressives, admitted to and apologized for lying about his lewd overtures to young women, using Twitter to transmit pictures of his package in boxer shorts.

I do not equate Congressman Weiner’s indiscretion to the serious accusations made against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but our social conscience is so divided over what is truly moral that it’s close to psychosis. I wonder whether or not an American jury is capable of making a qualified decision for or against Mr. Strauss-Kahn based on the merits of the case.

America is a strange place these days. We seem to eagerly enjoy not only judging but completely condemning our politicians’ sexual transgressions. Yet for as long as America’s history, this has not always been the case. Thomas Jefferson fathered a number of mixed-race children out of wedlock with his slave Sally Hemmings. Dwight Eisehower had a British girlfriend during the war. General Douglas MacArthur kept his Filipino mistress in good stead at the Senator Hotel in D.C. until his own mother told the woman to go packing. Jack Kennedy slept with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner, who was secretary and mistress to a mob boss. J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on Martin Luther King Jr.’s sexual indiscretions, but never revealed them. It was rumored a certain modern-day President’s father, also a President, had kept a mistress. Everyone, it seems, was too busy to take notice, and if I can recall, no one talked about it in the press.

Since Gary Hart — the first Congressman in recent memory who took the fall for sexual indiscretion in the late 1980s — there has a been a score of notable sex scandals bringing down men in high office, the highest in office being president Bill Clinton. Hart’s downfall coincided with the rise of the Religious Right as a political power in the US. This rise had its roots in what astrology calls the rise of conservatism, two years after Uranus and Pluto completed their wide-sphere conjunction and shortly after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The trend has continued since that time, with about the same cultural impact and intensity as the Sixties. In fact, it is the anti-Sixties movement, which in this age of instant communication and face time allows these scandals frequent visibility to the point of being invasive.

Our political, social and moral discourse has devolved from that of Deists informed by the philosophy of the Enlightenment to mean girls in high school. The separation between church and state is blurred. Now, regardless of gender preference and marital status, our elected representatives are walking a catwalk over an acid bath when it comes to public scrutiny over their personal lives. This scrutiny has became apocryphal when it comes to the results. Look at what happened when Bill Clinton got impeached for defending himself for lying about sex. The aftermath — eight years of neoconservative rule by a war and money-hungry cabal headed by Dick Cheney — is far worse than a simple sexual indiscretion.

Sexual scrutiny of politicians — “fair game” as they say in the Beltway — is a political retribution strategy with roots in America’s culture war between conservatives and liberals. That war has long ceased being about morality and has everything to do with fighting for and keeping power. It puts men and women in a painful political power vise: we are now geared to expect nothing less than moral perfection in our male leaders, who we still regard as father figures. Their human foibles, particularly lies about sex, become a form of political betrayal so deep to us that we lose sight of the stakes. It is now so morally skewed in this country that we hold politicians who lie about sex more accountable for those actions than for voting for the continued desecration of the social safety net, the neglect of the young and the elderly, the pollution of our planet and the torture and murder of other human beings.

Unless we stop them, politicians will continue to work schadenfreude — pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others — to their advantage against their rivals. The press earns income by inflaming our immediate and unconsidered opinion to inform public judgment about the disgrace. The pandering to the righteous earns dollars and political points, which makes it all too easy to allow this money-making wheel to crush Rep. Weiner and speed his fall from grace. That would be a shame. What’s even more shameful is that there are fellow party members ready to shun Weiner for this no-sex sexual escapade, who may even be guilty themselves but not found out. Yet.

In Weiner’s case, no one had contact. It was consensual. It was titillation. And it’s going to victimize all of us because we would rather accept the rules of a manufactured morality than to allow civil discussion, reason and personal forgiveness between the actual parties involved to work our way through this. What happens between two consenting adults is still none of our fucking business. What happens because we allow these moral judgments to take precedence over common sense and the issues at hand is. It’s not just about the People vs. the Imperfect Men, men who dwell in the houses of power. It’s about us. We may be thrilled by a politician’s charisma and their leadership, but they are not gods or kings, just men. It’s about us confronting our own shame and fear over admitting our own human failings. It’s about us drawing some kind of perverse feel-good over someone else’s obvious pain. Anthony Weiner has his own lesson to learn from this, and we do too, by allowing other people, particularly our leaders, room to be human themselves.