Casting Stones

I've grown used to hearing right-wingers drag Kennedy or Clinton's moral weaknesses out whenever they find themselves at a loss for intelligent words, but I thought they had more class than to drag Martin Luther King's infidelities into public. I was wrong. Motherlode at No More Apples spent Monday listening to several wingnut radio stations and noted the following:

In what almost seems to be a concerted effort, they have found it necessary, on this day set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King's great contributions to American civil society, to spend more time discussing his martial infidelities (which they imply trump any claims to "greatness" applied to him) and his surviving family's current squabbles than in reminding listeners of just how far we've come as a people due to his leadership.

It also strikes me as curious that the best-known philanderers, to conservatives, all seem to be Democrats or progressives: Kennedy, Clinton, King, Gary Hart, Wilbur Mills. What about Bob Packwood, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, William Randolph Hearst, Bill Cosby, Henry Hyde, Dick Morris, Newt Gingrich? And those are just the ones who come immediately to mind.

Motherlode finds the conservative obsession with sex, and their hypocrisy in condemning in one person what they cover up or brush off in another to be one of the most distasteful characteristics of the extreme right, and I have to agree. None of us is perfect, we all fight different demons, but to drag this kind of stuff out into the open all the time serves no purpose except to demean or denigrate; maybe that's the whole point since a person's lack of morals doesn't necessarily negate their accomplishments.

Here's the way I see it. If a man's (or woman's) work is inextricably linked with a certain code of behavior, their behavior is relevant in the way their work is to be judged. So Swaggart and Bakker deserve to have their contributions nullified because while they were preaching and teaching marital fidelity, they were practicing just the opposite. That's not the case with Kennedy, Clinton or King. While right wingers may insist that they were in a position of leadership that necessarily included modeling a certain type of behavior "for the children," that's a specious argument. I'm certainly not justifying cheating on one's spouse, but these men called upon Americans and government to adhere to and advance the principles embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, not the Bible. Their work should be evaluated by the extent that they were able to accomplish those goals, not by some measure of personal sexual morality.

Besides, the people who resort to rehashing this stuff all the time certainly aren't setting good examples of forgiveness for our children, and do they consider the humiliation and shame they bring upon the victim's family? King preached nonviolence and love for our enemies. It's time for some of the right wingers to put down their verbal guns and practice a little love.