Sex and the Capitol

The name Jessica Cutler might ring a bell if you read the D.C. tabloids, but if you don't, she was a Republican senator's staffer who got fired for publishing various accounts of sexual escapades she had online. The key here is that her escapades involved at least one married man and a number of D.C. insiders. Bad move, Jess. She's now being sued by one of the men she wrote about, for invasion of privacy (it's a bullshit claim, though- she never used his name, only his initials).

The thing is, that while reading about this retardedly lurid story (I felt like I was downing a gallon of ice cream, it was such a guilty pleasure), I came across an extensive Washington Post article that used Cutler's story as a segue into a really intelligent look at American mores and sexuality. One excerpt, which quotes pollster and analyst Daniel Yankelovich:

"The country is taken aback by moral relativism in all of its forms," Yankelovich says. "To me, the best way of thinking about it is that people are now free to say: 'I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't break the law.' An earlier generation, my own generation growing up in the United States, would say, 'What has the law got to do with it?' The usual model for societies is that they have a very thin layer of law and a very thick layer of social morality. What this expressive individualism has done, as an unintended consequence, is weaken that layer of social morality to the point where it's almost disappeared."

This is me again: I've argued this in the past, and those of you who know me best have probably heard this at one point or another, but this is a symptom of the very foundation of our Constitution. The United States of America was the first country in history to posit that the individual is more important than the collective good. That's why we have the bill of rights. That's why the Nazi Party is allowed to demonstrate in public. It's why our legal system allows death row inmates to appeal their sentences for decades instead of simply executing them immediately after trial. It's why questions as to where we draw the line on things like censorship and obscenity are so impossible to answer clearly.

But where does that leave us? Ah, there's the rub. What to do about our moral relativism? How to decide what IS right and wrong? And then, how to govern, how to enforce these "truths"?

What a quandary we have. Ain't it fun?