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.