There Are No Puritans, Just Politicos
Our moral outrage seems to be tied to our partisan attachments.
By David L. Bahnsen — October 9, 2016
I don’t have the time or room on the cloud to presently pen all that has been disappointing, illuminating, or eye-opening about the 2016 presidential-election cycle. In the days or weeks that follow Election Day there will be plenty of time for autopsy, and I am fairly sure I only mean that as a metaphor. But as we absorb a weekend of response to the bombshell video release of Donald Trump’s horrific and candid expressions of vulgarity, sexual braggadocio, adultery aspirations, adultery realizations, and not to mention bizarre sexual grammar, the reality is that we should have learned a much more important lesson than the one about Trump being a disgusting pervert (if, indeed, we didn’t already know that one, it says much more about our intellect than our moral compass). The takeaway from this weekend cuts through both parties and both sides of the ideological divide like a knife, and it is, put simply: One’s moral outrage at sexual deviancy is directly correlated to their partisan loyalties, no more, and no less.
When French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy took to the Daily Beast to defend Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund, for sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York City, his defense did not center around a declaration of his innocence; rather, he could not believe Strauss-Kahn was being “taken for a subject of justice like any other.” The French press, so enamored with Strauss-Kahn’s socialism, as it were, didn’t see a man who had been embroiled in an affair with an economist co-worker, or accused of raping a hotel maid (his claim was not that the incident didn’t happen; rather, that it was consensual), or eventually of being arrested in a prostitution ring. Rather, he was a “champion of the fragile and vulnerable,” a description that not only inadequately gives cover to sexual perversion, but also strikes me as wholly unfitting a man having sex with a hotel maid. But I digress.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/440885/print
