He had the language down perfectly at the Dec. 10 debate in Iowa. Asked about his family life and how it reflected on him as a candidate, Gingrich said: “I’ve made mistakes at times; I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness; I’ve had to seek reconciliation.” Two days later, he signed on to a conservative organization’s pro-traditional-marriage, antiabortion platform, adding, “I also pledge to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.”
Rule 3. Don’t have an affair.
Extramarital affairs, especially those uncovered in the course of a campaign, are still a problem with American voters. Cain, who was polling well in the GOP race this fall, saw his campaign falter because of sexual harassment allegations. But he ultimately suspended it because of an alleged extramarital affair.
That it was charges of an affair, rather than of harassment, that delivered the knock-out punch fits with what we know about public opinion. While attitudes toward sexual harassment are still in flux, Americans are strongly against extramarital sex. Indeed, they are more strongly against it now than in the recent past. In the General Social Survey, a national poll of adults conducted biennially by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the percentage of Americans who responded that it is “always wrong” for a married person to have sex with someone other than his or her spouse rose from 73 percent in 1991 to 81 percent in 2008.
Meanwhile, opinions about other aspects of sexual and married life have become more liberal. For instance, the percentage of people who responded that premarital sex is “not wrong at all” increased from 41 percent to 51 percent during the same period.
Put together, these three rules suggest that America is moving away from the old standard of lifelong monogamy to a new one of serial monogamy. Being married remains important, but we are allowed, even expected, to move from one marriage to another. However, we are supposed to remain sexually faithful to whomever we are married to at the time.
The problem with this new ethic is that it treats divorce as though it were an easy separation in which a faithful partner wearies of a spouse and wants to start searching for someone better. In practice, ending a marriage is often a gut-wrenching process. And it often involves extramarital affairs. In one national survey, 39 percent of those who had divorced or separated in the previous five years said that their spouses were involved with someone else before the marriage ended.
What we accept from our politicians in their personal lives is inconsistent with how our own personal lives work. The contradictions reflect our difficulty in coming to terms with the great changes in sex and marriage since our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. We value marriage, but we also value the right to pursue personal happiness.
To be consistent in what we are telling candidates, we would need to either return to the lifelong-monogamy standard and reject any candidate who has ever divorced, or suspend judgment on all aspects of a candidate’s personal life. The first is what we used to do in America; the second is what the French do today.
Neither alternative is attractive. A one-divorce-and-you’re-out rule seems too restrictive today. Yet turning a blind eye to personal life may prevent us from making fully informed judgments about a candidate’s integrity.
Perhaps the best we can do is emulate the British — give candidates wider latitude in the way they organize their family lives, but recognize the symbolic importance of markers of family stability, such as marriage. Private life would be neither fully on nor fully off the table. Voters would continue to expect political leaders to show moral worth in crafting policy and law. They would consider a candidate’s marital history if it were relevant to his or her conduct in office. But they wouldn’t hold the love lives of politicians to a higher standard than the love lives of the people they represent.
Andrew J. Cherlin is a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today.”
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