Community Levee Association

The Community Levee Association believes that "social gospel" and personal morality are not mutually exclusive and that each is important - one should take care of his own virtue and also work in the world to care for the physical, emotional, and spiritual well being of others.

Unoriginal sins By James A. Morone
Sunday, May 23, 2010

In 1845, America's most famous temperance crusader, John Gough, got caught dead drunk in a bordello. He responded with what would become the fallen Puritan's standard: I've shed "bitter tears of repentance." And besides, my enemies are at the bottom of this.

Scandal has long been an occupational hazard for moralizers. Last week, Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana, was the latest to be snared. Souder, a champion of family values and abstinence education, acknowledged an extramarital affair with an aide, Tracy Meadows Jackson. He quickly announced his resignation and -- following the familiar script -- said he was "ashamed" for having "sinned," and blamed the "poisonous environment of Washington" for his downfall.

Souder joins a long roster of lapsed Republican moralists who rode to power in part by preaching family values: Mark Foley (lewd text messages to House pages), Mark Sanford (mistress in Argentina), John Ensign (payoffs to the family of his former mistress), Larry Craig (wide stance in airport bathroom), House speaker-designate Bob Livingston (garden-variety affair) and the list goes on.

Of course, there are sinners on both sides of the aisle -- few falls from political grace have been quite as spectacular as those of Democrats John Edwards (child with a mistress) and Eliot Spitzer (Client No. 9).

You'd almost think Americans would be ready to concede the obvious -- that we are all imperfect -- and return our politicians' moral lapses to the realm of sad but private affairs. Well, that's not going to happen, and here's why.

Three different moralizing streaks run through American culture and history. The most powerful goes right back to the early Puritan settlers. Their idea was simple: Sinners impoverish themselves, diminish their communities and imperil America itself. President Ronald Reagan put it best, with a snippet mistakenly attributed to Tocqueville: "America is great because she is good. When America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

The quote touches the heart of the matter: Lost virtue will lead to national decline. Whenever those fears recur -- and the fears of national decline have rarely been more powerful than they are today -- cries about moral decay proliferate. Lewd leaders become a marker of the terrible state we're in.

Republicans are so often ensnared in career-ending hypocrisies because they have seized with such vigor the sackcloth of the prophet Jeremiah, who warned the sinful Israelites to repent of their wicked ways. While the Puritan jeremiad has a long American legacy, the contemporary version first showed up during the Carter administration. Evangelicals, outraged about Roe v. Wade and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, roared onto the political scene, organized the Moral Majority, helped elect Reagan, basked in his approval ("You can't endorse me," he beamed to a convention of evangelicals in 1980, "but I endorse you") and rightfully shared the credit for the rising Republican dominance. Their continuing influence keeps the party lashed to its Puritan mast. And among the prominent neo-Puritans stood Souder himself.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio), in turn, did not soften his judgment when he gave Souder the shove. His office said simply that Boehner holds party members to "the highest ethical standards."

A second moral tradition makes things still worse for our falling preachers by idealizing the leader who enters politics to do the right thing. The eternal model is George Washington, reluctantly accepting his duty to be commander of the Continental Army and then president of the new republic. Jimmy Stewart played the role a century and a half later in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Early Americans contrasted their leaders with the courtiers and aristocrats of the corrupted European monarchies. Today, the "tea party," for all its contradictions, taps right into this venerable way of thinking. The routing of incumbents in last week's primaries reverberates with the old contempt toward decadent political establishments.

As we keep hearing, government has lost touch with basic, popular virtues. Of course, the image of a frugal, honest, sober citizenry may stretch the facts, but in frightening times, the old myths take on new power.

For now, conservatives have seized on these two great moral traditions -- the Puritan and the republican. Meanwhile, there is an eerie silence on the left. Liberals no longer seem to relish the Puritans' fall. Perhaps that's because Democrats have lost touch with their own inner Jeremiahs.

What they are missing is a third moral vision that once defined American liberals -- the social gospel. A long line of reformers directed their moral rage at poverty, hunger, racism, segregation, sexism or other forms of injustice, turning the focus from individual sinners to communal wrongs.

Martin Luther King Jr. described the social gospel beautifully when he called on his listeners to become good Samaritans, to forget their selfish desires and to care for needy people of every race. King stood squarely in an American tradition of reformers stretching from William Jennings Bryan ("You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold") to Franklin Roosevelt ("These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is . . . to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men") and Lyndon Johnson ("Should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be [racially] unequal . . . then we will have failed as a people and as a nation"). From this perspective, political morality means worrying less about teen sex and more about ministering to our neighbors.

Two generations ago, Democrats tirelessly reminded the rich and powerful about their obligations to community, nation and planet. That would seem the perfect stance for our own "dark days." In this view, the big American problems -- King might have called them sins -- are not delinquent kids, single moms, drug abusers, illegal immigrants or errant members of Congress but disparities in health, education, wealth, wages and justice.

Today, the social gospel sounds like a quaint echo from the distant past. That's because there are so few leaders willing to stand up and articulate it. That failure diminishes our politics -- and the way the political parties fight their fights. Mark Souder was quite right to blame "the poisonous environment of Washington." Perhaps our hardball politics hastened his departure. But partisanship is nothing new. Nor is moralizing, or moralizers brought low by the very sins they preached against.

This time, however, the crude end of Souder's career barely made a stir beyond the Beltway. The emptiness in the sad spectacle suggests a deeper loss than the crash of another earnest conservative.

Conservatives find it hard to live up to their moral code; liberals find it hard to locate theirs. The tit for tat "gotcha" of sinning politicians is a poor alternative to a robust debate between visions of a good -- and moral -- American society.

James A. Morone, chairman of the political science department at Brown University, is the author of "Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History."

The Community Levee Association disagrees vehemently with Ms. Valenti's opinions below.

While researching her 2007 book "Virgin: The Untouched History," Hanne Blank went to Harvard's medical library looking for a definition of virginity. She was surprised by what she found: nothing. That's right, there's no accepted medical definition or diagnostic standard for virginity.

Why, in such an out-of-the-closet world, do we still define sexual initiation -- and in many quarters, virtue -- by such an artificial and old-fashioned standard? And why don't we mind that, increasingly, that standard is more about image than actual purity? Tween pop singers are trotted out wearing both miniskirts and promise rings, allowing their handlers to profit off the girls' sexuality without offending anyone's parents.

Promise rings, virginity pledges and other efforts to enforce chastity aren't just backward -- they're a failure, and they may even endanger teenagers. A 2008 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that pledgers are just as likely to have sex as non-pledgers and are more likely to have that sex unprotected. And researchers from Yale and Columbia report that teens who take virginity pledges are also more likely to engage in oral and anal sex than their peers. (Somehow, I don't think sodomy was what the creators of virginity pledges had in mind.)

These are the predictable results of telling teenagers that sex is wrong and that the only pure thing to do is wait. A teenager who takes these messages to heart won't in good conscience keep condoms -- much better to get "carried away" than to plan for an impure act. He or she may, however, look for loopholes, often dangerous ones. The health and the lives of young people are not worth risking over an arbitrary definition. And teaching young women -- and let's be honest, this is mostly about women -- that they must "save" their virginity only conflates their worth with their sexuality.

It's fine to have some way of demarcating sexual initiation, but old-school definitions of purity aren't it; they're more about inflicting shame than celebrating rites of passage. It's time we talked about sex as something healthy and natural. Losing "virginity" is one step in that direction.

George Huguely, Ben Roethlisberger, Lawrence Taylor: Male athletes encouraged to do the wrong thing
By Sally Jenkins
Saturday, May 8, 2010; D01

[The Community Levee Association believes the issues raised in the last two paragraphs deserves special attention.]


George Huguely is said to have been a vicious drunk who menaced Yeardley Love, yet there has been no indication that any of his teammates said anything to police. Ben Roethlisberger seems to be a serial insulter of women, whose behavior is shielded by the off-duty cops he employs. And if the charges are true, Lawrence Taylor ignored the bruises on a 16-year-old girl's face as he had sex with her, never thinking to ask who beat her.

It's a bad stretch for women in the sports pages. After reading the news accounts and police reports, it's reasonable to ask: Should women fear athletes? Is there something in our sports culture that condones these assaults? It's a difficult, even upsetting question, because it risks demonizing scores of decent, guiltless men. But we've got to ask it, because something is going on here -- there's a disturbing association, and surely we're just as obliged to address it as we are concussions.

"We can no longer dismiss these actions as representative of a few bad apples," says Jay Coakley, author of "Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies," and a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado. "The evidence suggests that they are connected to particular group cultures that are in need of critical assessment."

What do we mean when we ask whether there was something in the lacrosse "culture" that led to the murder of Yeardley Love? The Latin root of the word "cultura" means "to grow." It means the attitudes, practices, and values that are implanted and nourished in a group or society.

There's a lot we still don't know about Huguely and his "brothers," but three attitudes and practices of at least some members of the Virginia lacrosse team seem obvious: physical swagger, heavy drinking and fraternal silence.

In 2008, a drunken Huguely was so brutally combative with a female cop that she felt she had to Taser him. Last year, he assaulted a sleeping teammate who he believed had kissed Love, several former players say, and this year, he had other violent confrontations with Love herself, witnesses say.

We can argue about gaps in the system, but one constituency very likely knew about Huguely's behavior: his teammates and friends, the ones who watched him smash up windows and bottles and heard him rant about Love.

Why didn't they tackle him? Why didn't they turn him in?

Undoubtedly, many of the young men on the Virginia lacrosse team are fine human beings. I don't mean to question their decency. I don't mean to blame them.

But I do mean to ask those who knew of Huguely's behavior an important question. Why did they not treat Yeardley Love as their teammate, too?

Where were her brothers?

Why was she not deserving of the same loyalty as George Huguely? She played lacrosse. She wore a Virginia uniform. She was equally a champion. And yet because she played on the women's team, she seems not to have been accorded the same protection that Huguely was.

That doesn't just break the heart. It shatters it into a thousand pieces.

The allegations against Huguely, Roethlisberger and Taylor share something in common. In all of these cases, the alleged female victims were treated as undeserving of inclusion in the protected circle. They were "others" rather than insiders.

Sports Illustrated's profile of Roethlisberger and the men who look after him is utterly damning. According to the magazine story, on the night that he allegedly accosted an over-served undergrad in a Milledgeville, Ga., restroom, Roethlisberger held up a tray of tequila shots and hollered, "All my bitches, take some shots!" He exposed himself at the bar. He forced his hand up someone's skirt. Yet police sergeant Jerry Blash described the alleged victim as "this drunken bitch," and Roethlisberger's bodyguards apparently blocked off the area. Protecting Roethlisberger, being "in" with him, took precedence over ethics.

"Who needs the bodyguard here?" Coakley asks incredulously. "What is the role of bodyguard? It's not to maintain male hegemony and privilege. It's to maintain order."

The charge of third-degree rape against Taylor prompts another question. Police allege that a 16-year-old runaway was beaten by a sex trafficker and brought to Taylor's hotel room, where, according to police report, instead of protecting her, he allegedly protected himself with a condom. If Taylor is guilty, how could he have acted in such a depersonalizing way -- unless he viewed her as more object than person?

According to Coakley, the data is clear: Certain types of all-male groups generally have higher rates of assault against women than the average, and their profile is unmistakable. They tend to include sports teams, fraternities, and military units, and they stress the physical subordination of others -- and exclusiveness.

Common sense tells me that "sport" in general is not the culprit in all of this so much as excessive celebration and rewarding of it: binge drinking, women-as-trophies, the hubris resulting from exaggerated entitlement and years of being let off the hook. We are hatching physically gifted young men in incubators of besotted excess and a vocabulary of "bitches and hos."

What has happened to kindness, to the cordial pleasures of friendship between men and women in the sports world? Above all, what has happened to sexuality? When did the most sublime human exchange become more about power and status than romance? When did it become so pornographic and transactional, so implacably cold?

The truth is, women can't do anything about this problem. Men are the only ones who can change it -- by taking responsibility for their locker room culture, and the behavior and language of their teammates. Nothing will change until the biggest stars in the clubhouse are mortally offended, until their grief and remorse over an assault trumps their solidarity.