R E C E N T L Y
I serviced the president and all I got was this lousy Martha's Vineyard souvenir
Swinging with the sodomites
Why American athletes don't kiss and hug like soccer stars
Linda Tripp, the White House's ghoulish bad conscience
I'll take religion over gay culture
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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
Dear Camille:
Since President Clinton's quasi-confession on national TV, I have
been troubled by the language with which many well-known national
commentators have described the apparent sex act between Clinton
and Monica Lewinsky. Various people have described it as "repulsive," "cowardly,"
"a low moral act," "disgusting" and even worse. What gives? I don't find
that any of those words apply to sex between consenting adults, even if one
of the adults is the president. What am I supposed to be disgusted by?
People seem to have conveniently forgotten the fact that this relationship
was never meant to see the light of day. Ms. Lewinsky, in her affidavit,
denied the affair. Mr. Clinton, sometime later, denied the relationship in
his deposition. So far, so good. It is only when the grotesque Linda
Tripp shows up that this even becomes an issue.
The "moral outrage" I read about in various columns by pundits across the land seems to be entirely manufactured. I don't know anyone (and I know a lot of people) who is
morally outraged. I can only conclude that these people (Maureen Dowd,
George Will, David Broder, et al.) have more to gain by
keeping this thing going and that the level of "outrage" evinced by them
is hardly reflective of the general American republic, which seems on the
whole more sophisticated and temperate than any media person in the country.
-- F.C. Dudley
Dear Camille:
Now that Monica Lewinsky has graced the pages of Vanity Fair, do you think she will
make the cover of Cigar Aficionado? The rumors of her masturbating with a
stogie (unlit, I assume) while our pres. finished himself off would make her
a likely candidate, don't you think?
-- Enjoying the show in St. Joe, Mo.
Dear F.C. and Enjoying:
We're in a hazy twilight zone of rumor and half-truth at the moment. Until
independent counsel Kenneth Starr submits his long-overdue report to the
Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, no one can be
certain about the range and specificity of its account of President Clinton's
indiscretions or purported misdeeds.
Salon's international readers should be informed that the cigar story, spread
via the Internet in the week after the president's national address on Aug.
17, immediately became a veiled ribald joke among talk-show hosts, comedians
and political commentators. It remains to be seen whether the story will
stand up to scrutiny -- including its elaborate geopolitical mise en scène, where
PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was allegedly waiting for a powwow while the
president and his odalisque du jour romped in a study off the Oval Office.
The first thing that struck me about this piquant tale is that, if true, it
represents yet another example of the administration's hypocritical tobacco
policy, which privileges luxury cigars for Bill and his country-club coterie
but forbids simple smokes to anxious teens. If Monica keeps this sort of
thing up, her rosy little bottom will be ripe for the same maladies as the
inflamed mucosa of oral cancer. Since the vagina dentata seems to be self-petting Bill's secret fear (or backstage spousal reality), it's no wonder he
flings it a fat chaw, like a nicotine sop to Cerberus. Those who find the
Clintonian satyriasis interruptus a mark of enviable "virility" aren't looking
very closely at the sad little details.
Yes, Washington insiders -- who obviously know more about Starr's report than
they can print or say on air -- have been resorting to a striking panoply of
quaintly coded language ("repulsive," "disgusting," etc.) to describe Clinton's
inappropriate workplace escapades. I am particularly irritated to hear those
terms flowing so glibly from the mouths of pampered, peroxided, wet-behind-the-ears conservative pundettes whose limited life experience
and history of naked ambition hardly qualify them for postures of moral
outrage.
Rather than invoking morality -- which implies absolutes enforced by a
transcendent creator -- I prefer to speak of ethics, a rational system of social
conduct rooted in Greek philosophy. Ethically, in my view, there is much to
blame President Clinton for -- from his violation of the spirit of sexual harassment
policy to his bold-faced, one-on-one lying about the Lewinsky liaison to loyal
supporters like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who recently declared her faith in the
president's credibility to be "badly shattered."
However, it is still unclear whether Clinton has committed an impeachable
offense. Most Americans seem to feel that removing a duly elected president
from office is far too politically and psychologically disruptive. I may have
been the first commentator, in the early weeks of this scandal, to call for
congressional censure rather than impeachment. That symbolic act is
punishment enough for a president so focused on his place in history.
Pressure for resignation would surely come from nervous Democrats rather than
Republicans, who know that their best chance of regaining the White House in
the 2000 election is to keep a wounded Clinton in place. If only we had a
stronger foreign-policy team, there would be little risk in Clinton's muddling
on to the end. But I have very little confidence in that cynically partisan
paper tiger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, or our primly professorial
secretary of defense, William Cohen (who could moonlight as a hand-holding Ivy
League assistant dean), or that stammering, dyspeptic butterball, National
Security Advisor Sandy Berger -- of whom my partner Alison said last week, "I
wouldn't trust him with a water balloon." Clinton sure can't pick 'em.
But with all that said, I join the ranks of those deeply suspicious of the
motivation and methods of the present independent counsel, whose autocratic
powers are not constitutionally based and whose staff seems out of control.
The nation has less to fear from a weepy, aging adolescent perverting the Oval
Office with his tittering, diddly-weenie games than from a disorganized,
soulless, plastic-pussed, burrowing gerbil like Ken Starr.
Dear Camille:
What do you think of gay and lesbian couples adopting
children? This issue seems to cut deepest into the fabric of American
sexual identity and personal freedom. How do we begin to dissect and
understand the complexities of this issue, which involves government
legislature, the sanctity of marriage and the most powerful, emotional,
and romantic of all American ideals: the safety and welfare of
children? And where do you see homosexual adoption fitting into an
agenda of gay activism?
-- Curious
Dear Camille:
Recently, the governor of Utah mused during a press conference that
polygamy, which has been outlawed there since 1890, might actually be
protected in a religious context by the First Amendment. He caught hell for
this from the local establishment, including the (nowadays) virulently
anti-polygamist Mormon Church. Although I am not a polygamist, my
great-great grandfather, one of the early Mormon pioneers, had at least eight
wives. Polygamy was banned by federal law in the 1880s, and was prohibited
in Utah by the Mormon Church after 1890. Nowadays, the politico-religious
establishment in Utah has nothing but disdain for the few thousand
excommunicated Mormons who practice polygamy.
However, I have come to like
the idea of polygamy. It enables an alpha male to have sexual variety
without violating the sanctity of marriage. It permits multiple women to
share the resources of a wealthy man. Contrary to popular belief, the wives
of polygamists usually become close friends, and have been known to propose
to nubile young women to bring them into the marriage. The wives look after
each other and after each other's children, eliminating the need for
day care. The list of advantages goes on and on. Yet everyone with whom I
discuss the subject seems repulsed by the idea.
-- Pro-polygamy
Dear Curious and Pro-polygamy:
A close friend of mine was one of the first gays in the United States to
challenge the institutional hostility to gay adoptions. After several years
of frustrating delay and struggle, when it seemed he might have no other
recourse than to file a career-endangering lawsuit, he succeeded (in the early
'80s) in adopting a child from abroad.
Adoption should be a global strategy for the care of the orphaned or indigent.
If gays can give lifelong emotional and material support to a needy child, I
fail to see how government agencies may legitimately oppose it. On the other
hand, private or religious adoption organizations have the right to refuse gay
clients, and government should not intrude with its own liberal agenda.
Every child should ideally have (here I depart from most gay activists) both a
mother and a father, who make distinct and perhaps irreplaceable contributions
to psychological development. But that ideal is not always possible, and
nostalgia should not cloud our sense of children's urgent needs. For most of
human history, in fact, it was not the nuclear but the extended family that
did the child-rearing. In large families even today, older siblings assume
much of the parental role.
We don't really know whether the great social experiment of gay parenting will
work in the long run or not. At least another generation will be needed to
assess the results. But heterosexual-headed families are themselves in
turmoil, with many young people visibly suffering anomie and depression and
medicating themselves with mind-numbing drugs. In the 200 years since the
industrial revolution, Western culture has been slowly evolving toward new
forms of social affiliation that have weakened the traditional bonds of family
and clan. Is this utopian growth or decadent disintegration?
Gay activists who call for the legal recognition of gay marriage have been
remarkably silent or prudish about polygamy, an ancient practice that I
wholeheartedly support. The Mormon Church, under pressure during Utah's
19th century campaign for statehood, regrettably abandoned its
endorsement of polygamy, which was ultimately grounded in biblical chronicles
of the tribal Hebrew patriarchs. As with gay adoption or gay unions (I avoid
the inflammatory term "marriage"), I think that civil government has no
intrinsic right to define or police the quantity and kind of consensual
private relationships.
Polygamy may indeed be a rational and humane answer to the increasing problems
of aging women, who are often discarded at midlife by their still
procreatively potent husbands. In this era of quickie divorce and sexual
instability and isolation, polygamy could reconstruct the community of the old
extended family in ways that directly benefit children as well as the elderly.
Let's give it a shot!
N E X T_P A G E | Matt Drudge, spunky role model for today's processed youth
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