Larry Beinhart’s Body Politic: Then There’s Republican Sex

by Larry Beinhart, July 27, 2009

Marital fidelity is not an issue on which you select your brain surgeon. Sexual orientation shouldn’t affect your choice of automobile mechanic. A taste for cross-dressing at home has no relevance to the quality of work your plumber does.

Just so, a sane person would not say that what someone does with their genitals has any bearing on how good they are at running a county, a state, or a country.

Republicans, by contrast, have made genital placement (where one puts them, not where one has them) one of their signature issues. They call it “family values,” “character,” “faith,” and such, but what they’re saying is that personal sexual conduct is how a politician ought to be judged.

There is an upside to their position.

All the top political sexual scandals of 2009—Senator John Ensign, Governor Mark Sanford, former Congressman “Chip” Pickering, and Alan David Berlin—belong to Republicans. Very conservative, double-righteous, religion-sucking Republicans, at that.

It makes us free to wallow in their misery on a rational basis: They have demanded that this be how they should be judged.

Senator John Ensign of Nevada is a member of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. He has participated in mass rallies conducted by the Promise Keepers, a men-only Christian group, and during his four years as a congressman had a 100–percent voter approval record from the Christian Coalition.

When he’s in Washington he lives in the C Street Center.

It’s owned by The Fellowship, sometimes called “The Family.” It is an organization that envisions itself as a sort of Mafia for Christ (not their words). Their theology is that Jesus really loved the rich and powerful and disdained the meek and mild, and that there is a secret Bible within the Bible that says so. Their mission is to form a secret organization to rule the world and make themselves richer and more powerful because it’s what God wants. (I am not making this up.)

To effect this mission, they rent out living space to powerful and influential people at their headquarters for just $600 a month, a pretty great rate for downtown Washington, DC.

Ensign is married.

He was screwing one of his staff. Fairly standard practice, as staff and interns have the virtue of convenience and adultery is necessarily a sin of opportunity. The woman, Cindy Hampton, was also married. Her husband, Doug—who also worked for Ensign—got upset or greedy or both, and demanded cash for his pain. Or he would go public.

Ensign’s parents (there’s a caring Mom and Dad to this story) gave Doug $96,000, parceled out to his family members in $12,000 chunks to avoid bank-reporting issues and income tax liabilities.