Morality not a political, public issue

\"How can Jesse Jackson preach morality after fathering a love child?" demanded an indignant writer in the Jan. 29 issue of Time. \nIt's not a bad question, but I have a better one: How can the commercial media preach morality to Jackson, or to anyone else? \nThe Jackson scandal probably won't be as lucrative as the former President Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky soap opera, but it's entertaining to watch the mainstream media pick up a story that broke in the National Enquirer while trying to insist on their own high principles. The media can declare they are shocked. Shocked that a man of the cloth would commit adultery, while making money selling the salacious details. Journalism as a business means having the best of both worlds.\nIt's important to remember what the Time writer seems to have forgotten: that Martin Luther King Jr. is rumored to have had affairs. The suspected homosexual J. Edgar Hoover and the adulterer former President John F. Kennedy were concerned about the effect the adulterer King and his homosexual associate Bayard Rustin might have on American morality. \nLater, many conservatives opposed making King's birthday a national holiday because of his lax personal morality. \nHere's an even better question: How can anyone in American politics preach morality to Jackson? Americans generally seem to consider "political morality" an oxymoron, like "military intelligence" or "Christian thought." \nYet each time a political sex scandal breaks, the media solemnly take up the ancient question: Is it possible to separate a politician's private morality from his or her public morality? In other words, can an adulterer be a moral politician? This is an odd question. Conservatives, especially, love to show how tough-minded they are by invoking\n"Realpolitik" to rule morality out of policy-making. A concern with human rights or international law is weak-minded, idealistic, effeminate and (gasp!) liberal. Not that liberals are more idealistic: they hold principles so they can set them aside to prove their pragmatism. On this logic, shoddy personal morality is not only compatible with a political career, it's a prerequisite.\nBut what about "public" morality? Bombing civilians, instructing torturers and arming mass murderers, supporting brutal dictators who engage in ethnic cleansing, poisoning the environment at home and abroad with toxic chemicals, causing the starvation of children and dismantling social support systems for the poor, all of these examples and more are considered immoral by most people if done by our enemies. \nThose who worry that a political leader who commits sexual misconduct can't be a good politician are not worried that our government will commit such crimes. If anything, the opposite: They don't consider such acts, when committed by the U.S. government, to be immoral at all, and are very concerned that it might stop committing them.\nAnd our politicians are eager to oblige! For all their moralizing, conservatives never minded former President Richard Nixon's dishonesty and corruption; not even the many "expletives" on Nixon's White House tape recordings, which I suspect conservatives found more disturbing than the actual crimes discussed on those tapes. I recall one of Nixon's defenders, the head of the Committee for Fairness to the Presidency, telling reporters he didn't think Nixon had committed an impeachable offense -- he hadn't committed adultery, for instance.\nNor did former President Ronald Reagan's dishonesty and corruption bother conservatives, many of whom still consider him the greatest president of this century, if not of all time. They even manage to overlook the fact that Reagan was divorced and remarried (making him an adulterer by Biblical standards), and that he impregnated Nancy before they were married. Chastity, in the eyes of the Right, evidently is a requirement only for liberals.