More on Sanford

[pointedview]

mumpish, here's that response that was too lengthy for the comments in my previous post on the matter.

No, it is not about the sex. Not precisely, anyway. There are several factors that I feel are related.

Comments

[mumpish]

Wow. You spent a lot of time on this, and my reply isn't going to do it justice. I don't disagree with you, precisely, and I agree with you personally, morally, about importance of the wedding vows, but overall I don't think either Sanford or Clinton should step down over the sex act itself. It would be a strange strange world (although perhaps one with lower divorce rates) if every person who ever committed adultery got fired. And that was my original point; because I wanted Clinton to step down, I was tarred as a prudish moralist who only cared about the fact that Clinton got some strange. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You point out, correctly, that Sanford committed several ancillary acts - possible embezzlement, absence without leave - that constitute firing offenses. To me, those ancillary offenses are what the decision should turn on - did those acts violate policy or constitute dereliction of duty? I agree with you that they do, and to me it's simply not necessary to conflate the issue of sex.

In Clinton's case the ancillary issues were perjury and obstruction of justice, also firing offences in just about any job you can think of. But firing him for a lie about sex (indeed a lie about sex intended to obfuscate a separate civil charge of innapropriate sexual behavior) doesn't necessarily conflate with a judgement about the sex itself. That the issue of sex was so impossibly coiled up in the controversy doesn't mean Clinton's opponents were necessarily obsessed with it, but rather that Clinton spends an awful lot of time with his pants down.

I'm less comfortable with the other ancillary issue you raised - boffing a co-worker on the job - for a couple of reasons. If you unpack that, there are two different issues there - the idea of sex in the workplace and the idea of sex with a coworker at all.

On the first point, I'm inclined to forgive sex in the workplace because of the nature of the jobs both men hold. Clinton lived and worked in the White House; Sanford lived and worked in the Governor's Mansion. The nature of the job of a chief of state is that it's pretty much always on; Clinton more so than Sanford, obviously, but the civilian distinction of work and home life really doesn't exist for these men. It's a matter of record that Clinton and Lewinsky committed whatever 'inappropriate relations' they got up to in the White House, but it's a pretty unreasonable expectation that Clinton would get a hotel somewhere. Sanford, with greater freedom of movement and less surveillance, could probably take this option, and probably lives closer to his actual civilian residence, but I haven't been paying close enough attention to know if he did, in fact, ever sleep with his love interest in the Governor's Mansion. Either way, I find myself not caring.

On the second point, Sanford's off point because the woman involved is not a coworker. Only the Clinton example is relevant here, and in this case, civilian reality is applicable. The simple fact is that workplace romance is common, and in many workplaces it's not a firing offense; in fact policies run the gamut from no policy at all, to a requirement that such relationships be disclosed to HR, to banning relationships between reports, to outright bans altogether. Clinton's actions were certainly unwise, and policies that do ban some or all workplace relationships are aimed at preventing exactly the sort of situation that the Jones lawsuit presented. But in a purely technical sense, the tryst with Lewinsky was legit - Clinton wasn't subject to an HR policy, and there was no law or Constitutional requirement violated by his actions.

(Continued in a second comment)