16 August 2009

John Edwards and America's obsession with other people's sex lives

Once again, John Edwards' affair with a former campaign worker is taking journalism to new lows.

The National Enquirer (the mother of all U.S. tabloids) is reporting that a recent DNA test has proven that the former senator and former presidential candidate is indeed the father of his former mistress's 18-month-old daughter.

And mainstream media outlets across the country are picking up on the story and running with it. Because sex sells. Especially in America, where people are obsessed with what other consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, hotel rooms, or restroom stalls.

I am not defending John Edwards. Who can defend a man who carries on a tryst with a young blonde while his wife is fighting cancer?!

But it should be none of my business nor yours, even if Edwards had won the presidential nomination or the election.

Until the recent rise of the so-called Christian Right, politicians' sex scandals really did seem to receive much less public scrutiny. For example, everyone knows the rumors of Jack Kennedy's affair with Marilyn Monroe, but that never seemed to shrink the high pedestal on which his presidency still stands.

In Europe, where politicians' affairs and divorces are met with disinterested yawns, America surely must look like a snickering, emotionally immature, sex-obsessed adolescent.

And, even though we now have an adult in the White House, I don't see this attitude changing as long as the sanctimonious hypocrites of the religious right continue to have a platform and a willing audience of pliable sheep.

Because of America's twisted obsession with other people's sex lives, a president was impeached for lying about an affair, but his successor received nary a slap on the wrist for using blatant lies to justify an unnecessary war of aggression on an unarmed nation.

War - good. Sex - bad. This is what America has become.

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