Missing The Boat: The Strange Case Of Martha Nussbaum
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Law | Silly Excuse-Mongering | Spitzenfreude | Sptizmas — Comments (15) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Comes now the philosopher Martha Nussbaum to inform us that the fact that Eliot Spitzer had to resign as Governor of the State of New York is A Very Bad Thing and proof that we Americans are insufferable prudes who still have a long way to go before we can be considered sophisticated and cosmopolitan.
This is all so very tiresome. At the outset, let us remind ourselves that as Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings. If recent reports are to be believed and Spitzer has been soliciting prostitution for as many as 6 years (spending nearly $80,000 in the process), that means that Spitzer was soliciting prostitutes even as he was busting the rings and looking like Mr. Clean in anticipation for his gubernatorial run in 2006 in the process. As Governor, Spitzer signed into law legislation that increased the penalties on people soliciting prostitution. Spitzer's hypocrisy is, of course, both nothing short of astonishing and utterly inescapable and yet, Nussbaum does not even address it.
What Nussbaum does engage in is the well-worn practice of warning us that our behavior in circumstances such as these leaves ever so much to be desired because the Europeans just don't approve, darlings. This constant effort to make the Europeans look like sexual sophisticates when compared to their supposedly dumber and less-worldly American cousins is more than a little grating because contrary to popular belief--and Nussbaum's fevered imaginings--the Europeans are actually rather prudish about sex. Remember the Profumo Affair? John Profumo didn't get to keep his job after his dalliances became a matter of public knowledge. Like Profumo, Spitzer compromised himself through his solicitation of prostitution and made himself vulnerable to blackmail. And as in the Spitzer matter, the public reacted with anger and disgust towards the news of Profumo's activities.
Want more evidence that the Europeans are significantly more prudish than Nussbaum gives them credit for? Ask how well John Major's government fared in the wake of the many sex scandals that befell it. I don't recall Tony Blair as having lost the election of 1997 to Major and the repeated revelations of sex scandals affecting Tory politicians in the run-up to the 1997 election were one of the most important factors contributing to the fall of the Major government.
Lest anyone think that this European prudishness is confined to Britain, consider the case of France. Extramarital affairs amongst French politicians are only tolerated if they are kept quiet and out of the news. Once they get into the news, the French public can be as disapproving as any Puritan colony out there. Indeed, the revelation of romantic affairs significantly more honorable than the solicitation of prostitution can land French politicians in hot water with a puritanical public. Nicolas Sarkozy divorced his previous wife, met and fell in love with Carla Bruni and married her swiftly after their romance commenced. The French reacted to this high-profile marriage--a marriage, not a visit to the red light district--with much tut-tutting and caused Sarkozy's once-high approval ratings to plummet precipitously.
Finally, Nussbaum seeks to change the debate from "Should Eliot Spitzer have been forced to resign and potentially face prosecution?" to "Should prostitution be illegal in the first place?". The latter makes for an interesting public policy question and Nussbaum puts forth arguments to explain why the selling of one's body for sex should not be such a big deal. One can, of course, debate these issues--and Heaven knows that we have, ad nauseam--but none of this changes the fact that there are laws against prostitution, that Eliot Spitzer broke those laws, that he had made a name for himself as Attorney General and as Governor in fighting prostitution both on the supply and on the demand sides and that thanks to his indiscretions, he has robbed himself of the moral authority to run the State of New York and has exposed himself to legal prosecution in the process.
This is yet another instance where evidently, we have to remind Spitzer defenders that no one is responsible for this sorry state of affairs save Eliot Spitzer. If you want to write an angry blog post, devote it to denouncing the soon-to-be-ex-Governor of the State of New York. He deserves it. And then some.
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of Greek philosophy, she has written some fine essays, such as those in "The Fragility of Goodness."
http://www.amazon.com/Fragility-Goodness-Ethics-Tragedy-Philosophy/dp/05...
As a philosopher in the Aristotelian tradition, she'd have Aristotle rolling in his grave.
I, too, admired her work, especially her excellent work Upheavals of Thought, but I'm afraid her good stuff has come in spite of her liberal progressivism, which taints her work on topics where she has a chip on her shoulder (feminism, etc).
Her name translates from German to English as "Nut Tree." Her take on the Spitzer situation confirms the correctness of that name.
... they put on a jaded long-suffering air and prognosticate about how much nobody cares about this in France. They're correct of course - who cares about Eliot Spitzer visiting New York prostitutes in France?
But it turns out that they are incorrect about the fashionably jaded and amoral sophisticated French being non-prudes when it comes to French politicians. But when did that ever stop a Lefty?
However, when it's a Republican? Why, he should be hung, drawn and quartered, the hypocrite! And this applies even if it turns out that the guy was having sex with his own wife ...
Martha Nussbaum may be an exception. Most of the Leftists who have adopted the "sophisticated Europhile" ploy, like Alan Dershowitz, are male. Liberal women willing to defend Spitzer are much rarer, Nussbaum notwithstanding.
The issue has once again revealed a sharp "gender gap" among the Left. The women, most of whom are feminists, are horrified and furious at the breezy attitude of the male Leftists toward this issue. And you can see that in some of the replies to Nussbaum on the webpage containing her article.
From what I have seen, Leftist blogs like DailyKOS are dominated by a bunch of largely male geeks, who have found this type of online "radical political activism" easier than street-fighting, hurling rocks at cops, dodging tear gas, getting arrested, and being clubbed over the head by cops, like their Leftist ancestors.
Feminist doctrine, which is elsewhere a hallmark of modern Leftism, is notably absent from these blogs much of the time. They care much more about global warming than about a "woman's right to choose" anything.
say about what Europeans think about us were all very nasty and crude....so I will just say.....who care's darling?.....snobby and yet being taken over from the inside out by middle eastern countries...Europeans really need to stop paying attention to us and tend to their own garden...
Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion
immaterial to this case. The facts are that the chief legal officer of the state of New York broke the law, and did so in a manner which exposed him to possible blackmail and manipulation by organized crime.
Why doesn't someone tell this silly woman that she is just a fool?
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
for example the wild night life in PARIS and BERLIN isn't tolerated out in the countryside of FRANCE and GERMANY.
It would like thinking all small town's in America has the same values as LAS VEGAS , MIAMI , and SAN FRANCISCO
1) Bill Clinton didn't break the law in his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. It was terrible and shouldn't have been done, but the actual ACTS did not break the law (I'm ignoring the lying about it later for right now).
2) Elliot Spitzer broke the law.
Broke the law while he was enforcing it on others.
End of story.
In fact, he broke the SELFSAME LAWS he was famous/notorious for enforcing.
Even people being on record as favoring the legalization of prostitution (such as Glenn Reynolds/Instapundit) thought he should go after that.
The claim that Europeans are more forgiving of politicians' sexual escapades is a half-truth. There is an unwritten law among non-tabloid journalists to look the other way about mistresses, one-time trysts, rumors of homosexuality,...
However, the moment it spills over (no pun intended) into an area where it may cast doubt on the politician's performance on the job (no pun intended), they are not much more forgiving than Americans. If, say, a politician is known for pushing traditional Catholic moral values and then caught making a mistress pregnant and pressuring her into an abortion, it WILL generate revulsion about hypocrisy. So Elliot Shpritzer and Larry "Wide stance" Craig would have been in hot water in Europe as well. I'm not so sure about Slick Willy, since most people would think a politician shouldn't be forced to answer questions under oath about a consensual affair in the first place. (Then again, some Euros would question the consensual nature of an affair between a powerful boss and a junior underling..)
I, personally, lost my respect for Slick Willy not when his affair(s) were revealed, but when I learned (from the Starr report) he was discussing the grave situation in Bosnia over the phone while simultaneously being Lewinskyed. A man so obsessed with his sexual pleasures that he cannot set them aside for discussions that may be life or death for thousands of people has no business leading a country.
I wonder what Nussbaum thinks about engaging your chauffeur in ménage à trois for almost a decade, and then turning around and claiming that you were "tricked into a loveless marriage" when your husband had to resign the governorship after frequenting truck stops and book stores for sex, and appointing people with zero qualifications to important government positions?
We can already imagine the answer: Dina Matos McGreevy had to claim that she was an innocent and ignorant victim, because admitting that she and her husband were a couple of perverted horndogs with their chauffeur prior to and after their marriage wouldn't be acceptable in America's prudish, backward, bible-thumping culture. So the culture forced her to lie, to protect her reputation. See how it works?
Despite her continued relatively high-profile existence, Nussbaum was soundly beaten about the head and shoulders by Robert George years ago during and after the Romer v. Evans trial (see George's critique of her in "Shameless Acts Revisited" available in full, sadly, only on JSTOR).
I am not in the least bit surprised by her continuing flight into moral relativist territory. Take the majority of what she says cum grano salis.