NewYorker | Still, the force works selectively. “I, of all people, am aware that
there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has
bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval
Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for
the Senate with the full support of his party,” said Franken, referring
to Donald Trump and the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Trump and Moore are immune because the blunt irresistible force works only on the other half of the country.
That half is cleaning its ranks in the face of—and in clear reaction
to—genuine moral depravity on the other side. The Trump era is one of
deep and open immorality in politics. Moore is merely one example.
Consider Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who won his
congressional race earlier this year after not only being captured on
tape shoving a newspaper reporter but then also lying to police about it. Consider the tax bill,
which is stitched together from shameless greed and boldface lies.
Consider the series of racist travel bans.
Consider the withdrawal from a series of international agreements aimed
at bettering the future of humanity, from migration to climate change to
cultural preservation. These are men who proclaim their allegiance to
the Christian faith while acting in openly hateful, duplicitous, and
plainly murderous ways. In response to this unbearable spectacle, the
roughly half of Americans who are actually deeply invested in thinking
of themselves as good people are trying to claim a moral high ground.
The urge to do so by policing sex is not surprising. As Susan Sontag
pointed out more than half a century ago, Christianity has “concentrated
on sexual behavior as the root of virtue” and, consequently, “everything
pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment