While the spectacular exercise in self-destruction South Carolina
governor Mark Sanford has engaged in over the past couple weeks has
been embarrassing, what I’ve found most embarrassing was some of the
reaction to it.
Of course, what Sanford did was somewhat clichéd. He put his
own special spin on an age-old tale, no doubt. But in the end, Sanford
was just the same as those who came before him: a powerful man undone
by sexual scandal. Nothing really new there.
But in the days following the release of
e-mails between Sanford and his mistress, I saw something I’d
never seen before.
When something like this happens to a politician, you expect certain
things. The party hacks of the busted seek to minimize the damage and,
if need be, cut the man loose to protect the cause. The other side
seeks to cut the man’s political jugular while it is exposed and
attempt to amplify and universalize the situation. In this
instance, it was Republicans on defense and Democrats on offense. But
it could have been vice versa just as easy.
One lefty blogger, “Southern Beale,” as well as other national blogs
and comments on Twitter, actually showed some
sympathy for the GOP governor. Why? Because his e-mails to his
mistress showed genuine “love.” Or, in another blogger’s
words, his e-mails were “hot.”
“While I’m sure plenty of liberals are going to take potshots at him
for those e-mails,” wrote Beale, “I’m enough of a sap to find them
charming. Touching. And terribly romantic.”
But it doesn’t end there.
“I just want to give Mark Sanford a hug. This guy poured his heart
out onto the keyboard to his one true love, and I just hate to see him
mocked for it. Call me sappy, hormonal, sentimental, whatever, but this
is the stuff of a great summer romance,” wrote Beale.
True love? Whether said in jest or not, there is something
disturbing about seeing Sanford’s words described this way. Is this how
our culture views love? A married father of four, a leader of men,
sending e-mails to a woman not his wife. This is love? I’m not even
making a judgment about whether a politician’s sex life should have
bearing on his political life. That is a political question. I’m more
concerned about our culture and how we view concepts like love and
monogamy. Is there a sizable population out there that thinks those
e-mails Sanford sent represent love?
Infatuation? Maybe. Romance? Possibly. Willful self-destruction?
Definitely. But true love? How can you call a short-term,
intercontinental, extramarital affair love? The relationship between
Sanford and Maria Belen Chapur is not love. It is fleeting. It is a
powerful man letting his sense of entitlement get to him. To call those
e-mails evidence of love cheapens the concept.
As much as religious conservatives like to talk about gay marriage
assaulting the institution, Sanford did more damage to traditional
marriage than two men living together as husband and husband could ever
possibly do. Because if Sanford’s relationship was love, then we might
as well throw the concept of monogamy right out the window. One cannot
stay infatuated for a lifetime, after all. Even romance fades or at the
very least ebbs and flows.
Love is not easy; it takes work. And although I admit I am no
expert, it almost certainly does not come during jaunts to Buenos
Aires.
We wonder why divorce rates are so high in this country. It’s not
gay marriage or even a lack of religion or faith. It’s that everyone
wants to be the star of their own personal romantic comedy. Everyone
wants, as Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, the “fairy
tale.”
John Lennon famously said, “Life is what happens while you make
other plans.” Well, love is what happens while you are waiting on the
fairy tale. That is, if you let it. Respect, loyalty, trust —
these are the building blocks of love. Chasing infatuation like a
junkie, like Sanford did, will get you nowhere — and quick.
Tan lines, the curve of a woman’s hips, and the erotic beauty of a
woman holding herself (three things cited in Sanford’s e-mails) are all
wonderful, don’t get me wrong. But they are not love. And in our
instant-gratification, disposable culture it has been increasingly
instilled in our subconscious that we should search out and place value
on superficial happiness.
Sanford did a selfish, self-absorbed thing. We condemn it, but many
of us do it ourselves. Sometimes we violate the bonds of marriage to do
it, sometimes we dissolve those bonds first. But chasing this
oversexed, adolescent ideal of love is destructive, and it is rampant
in our society.
Sex, romance, and adolescent infatuation are all fine things. But
when those things go away, that which is left, that is what love is
— or isn’t. Mark Sanford forgot that. We should not.
A.C. Kleinheider writes the “Post Politics” blog for the
Nashville Post, where a version of this column first
appeared.
