Who’s on the Moral High Ground Now?

Adultery is as American as apple pie. That is the overarching lesson of 1999, which began with the sex scandal of a president and ended with the messy divorce of his leading detractor.

Newt Gingrich deserves the same respect for his privacy that should have been accorded Bill Clinton, and it is in that spirit that I applaud the recent news that his divorce has been settled. Thank goodness that we will not be taken through the tawdry details of the former House speaker’s admitted 6-year affair. It is enough to know that it was more extensive than that of the president he hypocritically tormented, and also conducted with a woman young enough to be his daughter and whose employment he ultimately supervised. Gingrich once again chose divorce, leaving the Clintons as the purer defenders of traditional values for at least preserving the family tie.

But, had the case gone to trial, there were a number of potentially embarrassing questions raised by Gingrich’s wife of 18 years that the judge in the divorce case had ordered him to answer. One still deserves a public response: “Do you believe that you have conducted your private life in this marriage in accordance with the concept of ‘family values’ you have espoused politically and professionally?”

Gingrich had claimed that his “revolution” stood for a return to the values of what he called “normal Americans.” But clearly his admission to having conducted an affair with a young aide while he led the campaign to impeach the president suggests a broadening of the definition of normal.

It was, after all, Gingrich who lambasted liberals, and indeed all Democrats, for substance abuse, sex, violence and most of all, out-of-wedlock births. If a pregnancy had occurred in the course of his adulterous affair, would the then-speaker have favored an abortion? To be consistent with his anti-abortion position, he would have had to encourage the birth of the child, but would he have then stigmatized his own offspring as “illegitimate,” as he did the children of poor women on welfare?

In a 1995 speech to the Conference of Mayors, while in the throes of his own secret affair, Gingrich celebrated the values of Victorian England for “reestablishing values, by moral leadership and by being willing to look at people in the face and say, ‘You should be ashamed.’ ” But we have heard not a word of his own shame. Instead, he now appears--trademark arrogance intact--as a cultural commentator accepting $50,000 lecture fees, serving on corporate boards and working as a pundit for Fox Television.

Rather than shame, there are the frequent sightings of Gingrich as a man about town, lover in hand, as in the Washington Post Reliable Source Column report last week: “Newt Gingrich and Callista Bisek stepped out in style over the weekend, no doubt breathing a sigh of relief over the former House speaker’s divorce settlement agreement last week with soon-to-be ex-wife Marianne Gingrich. The Source’s resident Fun Couple was spotted dining Saturday night at the Carlyle Grand Cafe in Arlington and Sunday night at Landini Brothers Italian restaurant in Old Town. No word on the tip or their wine purchases.”

OK with me; I was never one for shame and guilt. But the fact that Gingrich, according to press accounts, now “lives in sin,” as it were, could be the occasion for expanding our notion of what is tolerable in the human experience. For example, it makes a monogamous gay marriage seem a model by comparison.

Let us then not dwell on a condemnation of the lifestyle of Newt Gingrich, or Bill Clinton, but rather welcome them back into the forgiving embrace afforded by our common humanity. Given the equally egregious peccadilloes of past revered male leaders, we should accept that sexual sloppiness is natural to the breed. It’s conceivable that the equation of testosterone and the urge to power is genetically hard-wired, at least for “alpha” men.

That Gingrich shares the president’s reckless pursuit of extramarital sex, despite the social opprobrium that is its expected consequence, attests, for better or worse, to the “normalcy” of that particular drive. No wonder there is such widespread demand in this country for a public posting of the Ten Commandments, which may be likened to the ineffectual practice of compulsive eaters who place diet warnings on their refrigerator doors.