Lying About Sex: A Wrong or a Right?

The impeachment of Bill Clinton is not about sex, it’s about lying, Republicans insisted over and over during the yearlong investigation of the president’s relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

As if that clarified anything.

Despite today’s changing mores, sex and lying still go hand in hand, as they always have. Moreover, Americans today may be more deeply ambivalent and divided than in the past about each of those subjects--and about the knotty relationships between them.

For, unlike most American political scandals, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair mirrors contemporary society. Where Watergate unveiled abuses of government power, this scandal exposed problems that hit close to home--in many cases, too close for comfort. No wonder so many voters find Clinton’s conduct deplorable but not alarming, certainly not worth ripping the government apart over. When many look at the White House, part of what they see is themselves.

Sandra Borden, a professor in the communications department at Western Michigan University, recognizes this in the 60 students in her communications ethics class. They say a president should be a role model, and they don’t want to think about the Washington scandal.

When she asked students to write about privacy and lying, not one picked the president’s crisis. “The last thing they wanted to do was to think about it any systematic way,” Borden said.

At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, professor Cynthia Halpern found students in her ethics and public policy class incredulous that anyone expected Clinton to tell the truth about an extramarital affair. “This was by far the most cynical class I’ve ever had,” Halpern said.

David Blankenhorn, head of the Institute for American Values in New York, said there is rarely a need for morality police in a healthy society. “But, my God,” he exclaimed, “I’m astonished that people are lied to and just yawn.”

That they do, he said, reflects a societal shift. “Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, Clinton’s behavior would have been judged much more harshly. What we’re seeing is what happens when the moral canopy that arches over everything--including politics--becomes questionable.”

Like it or not, the public has faced a 13-month bombardment of revelations about thong underwear, corridor groping and oral sex. It was the stuff of supermarket tabloids and lockeroom jokes elevated to the highest office in the land. It provided all the raw material that the late-night monologuists could absorb, the grist that allowed David Letterman to deadpan that Clinton had decided that if his approval ratings got above 60%, he could start dating again.

As Letterman’s irreverence suggests, not all Americans are alarmed by the year of scandal. Many, especially in the more cosmopolitan cities, consider it preposterously overblown, another chapter in the country’s Puritan history.

Yet many on the front lines, especially parents, see the Clinton affair as part of an almost overwhelmingly difficult issue.

‘Kids Are Raised on This Stuff’

Catherine Norton, the 40-something mother of four, grew up in a small town in Iowa and now lives in Menlo Park, Calif., the wife of a surgeon and cancer researcher.

She has not abandoned the traditional values of her childhood, but she has a more complex view of the realities of human nature. And she feels almost drowned in a culture that seems to have left those views behind.

“It’s a dilemma,” she said. “On the one hand, having grown up Catholic in Iowa in the ‘50s and ‘60s, sex was just taboo.” Now, her children are exposed to an endless diversity of sexual material. “It’s the message you get--from television, movies, everything. If you listen to it, you’d think it’s normal. Kids are raised on this stuff.”

That helps her understand Clinton’s behavior, although she would be horrified if her husband or children copied it.

“These things happen,” she said. “They shouldn’t, but they do. What Clinton did, anybody could have done. I told the kids that what he did was wrong and you shouldn’t do it. But he made a big mistake and he’s paying a big price for it.”

Kathleen Perkal, a mother of two junior high school-aged boys and a younger daughter in suburban Washington, has taken a traditional line with her children.

“At their age, I’ve tried to establish an extremely clear black and white sense of what’s right and wrong,” she said, but she herself feels the ambiguities. “My own values are definitely more grayed than that. It comes with age.”

Drawing up rules about sex, and developing ways to deal with the large gaps that almost always exist between the rules and the reality, has challenged every society. The oldest written records, including the Bible and the Greek classics, focus on sexual relationships that broke the rules; those writings remain vital because their themes seem so contemporary.

Polls show traditional values of monogamy and faithfulness are supported by overwhelming numbers of people and observed by large majorities most of the time. Yet in a society in which half of all first marriages end in divorce and many second marriages also fail, it’s clear that the gap between ideals and reality remains large.

After all, the country isn’t exactly timid about sex. By some estimates, Americans spend upward of $8 billion annually on pornography, more than Hollywood’s domestic box office receipts.

And relationships between men and women exist in a far different climate from a generation ago. Sexual happiness has become an openly discussed goal, if not an absolute right. Gay sexuality, in many offices and families, is a matter of course.

The courts and company grievance proceedings abound with the painful details of what can happen now when boy meets girl on the job. The Supreme Court is now hearing a major case about a fifth-grader in Georgia being sexually harassed by a fellow student.

“People are asking: What is the role of sexuality in peoples’ lives?” said Laura Nash, director of the Institute for Values-Centered Leadership at the Harvard Divinity School. “We thought it was OK in our permissive society because anything goes, but we’ve discovered it’s not trivial, it has enormous consequences and it leads to other problems, to lying.

“This is a healthy debate,” she said, “but a confusing one.”

An Issue Awash in Shades of Gray

For House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, the Clinton case came down to “a debate about relativism versus absolute truth.” For many others, however, lying comes in even more shades of gray than sex.

The ideal, still cherished by most, is epitomized by the legend of George Washington and the cherry tree. The reality is closer to Shakespeare’s lament, “Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying.”

As Sissela Bok found in her 1989 study, “Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life,” deception is widely practiced--and justified--not only in personal life but in the professional lives of doctors, lawyers, scientists, journalists, law enforcement officers, businessmen, politicians and government officials.

Those who abuse the truth often defend their lies as justifiable, even morally superior to unqualified candor. Doctors have long cited humanitarian grounds for telling patients less than the whole truth about illnesses; the Supreme Court has ruled that police and prosecutors may, in some circumstances, lie to suspects if that will encourage them to incriminate themselves.

“The fact is that reasons to lie occur to most people quite often. Not many stop to consider the choices confronting them,” Bok concluded. As the Clinton-Lewinsky example suggests, that pattern is all the more common when the issue is sex.

In a 1998 Roper Center survey, 39% of respondents said they did not consider lying about sex to be as serious as lying about other things. Indeed, concealing sexual missteps is often considered morally superior if done to avoid hurting family, spouse or lover. At the most elementary level, a certain amount of lying is accepted as a necessary social lubricant.

When Jimmy Carter first sought the White House, he promised “I will never lie to you.” During the campaign, Carter’s mother conceded in an interview that the future president had sometimes told “little white lies” when growing up.

What made white lies acceptable? the interviewer demanded. “Well,” Miss Lillian replied, “you know when you came in here just now, and I said how sweet and pretty you were . . . ?”

Long-Term Impact on Country Unclear

Now, with Clinton’s fate decided, what will be the long-term impact on individuals, couples, families and children? In a country as large and diverse as the United States, there can be no single or simple answer. Several things seem probable, however.

First, spreading the explicit details on Clinton and Lewinsky’s gropings on the record--including the Internet and the evening news--has already breached, for well or ill, some of the surviving inhibitions about open references to subjects such as oral sex.

Potentially more important, the scandal may well precipitate national pondering about the way people strive to impress values on their children, the way they approach society’s laws and the way they deal with one another.

“You’d like to hope one of the positive outcomes of it would be that people talk about it. But it’s a lot more than Clinton. It’s everything,” said Menlo Park’s Norton.

What a great many Americans appear to hope is that such introspection might prompt a swing back toward traditional values, but without the intolerance for human frailty that existed in some earlier times.

In the minds of many, tired of the prying into the lives of politicians, privacy may also have received a boost.

“If somebody asked a question about your sex life or mine, you’d say jump in the lake,” said Swarthmore’s Halpern. “I think that’s where we’re going--to a more clear line between public life and private life.”

At the very least, Clinton’s conduct forcefully reminded the country that--even in today’s more permissive society--engaging in illicit sex and lying about it can have fearsome consequences.

“You can’t act just thinking of yourself and human desire,” said Judy Balswick, who teaches in the marriage and family therapy program at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. “You can’t just deny when something has an impact on the people you love.”