Anthony Weiner’s Biggest “Sin” Was Taking Photgraphs
June 20, 2011 at 1:27 PM Leave a comment
Hendrik Hertzberg over at The New Yorker has a good piece up about “Weinergate:”
The bad things Weiner did do—his sins, let’s call them for convenience, without embracing the churchy implications—were, once revealed, a hundred per cent visible. And a hundred per cent of them were visible. They were a hundred per cent documented. No he said/she said this time, no need for witnesses, no need for testimony. No need for “evidence”—because the evidence wasthe sin, and the sin the evidence.
Weiner’s sins consisted of nothing but his own documentation of them. The documentation was the sin, not the acts documented. Without the documentation, not only could no sin be proved, no sin could be committed. Is flexing one’s pecs in the mirror a sin? Is baring one’s penis when there is no one else in the room? Unlike, say, adultery, these become sins only when they are converted to pixels. I suppose flirtation may be considered a sin, especially when it consists of sharing (as distinct from enacting) an explicit sexual fantasy with a person not one’s spouse. But what if the person is hundreds or thousands of miles away, and what if the sharing isn’t even in real time? It’s a sin to lie, but is it a sin to tweet? Apparently.
[...]Imagine, though, that nothing had been left to the imagination in certain other cases. In one such case, there was a blue dress with a stain on it. But what if there had been a video, or even a snapshot, of the moment the dress received the stain? What if the picture itself had been the whole point? What if every detail of every sex scandal of the last quarter-century, every word and every scene, had been photographed and archived, available for global retrieval at the click of a mouse? How high would Weinergate rate on the shock-o-meter? Not very, is my guess.
Exactly. And that’s what his Democratic colleagues should have been shouting about and why he shouldn’t have resigned.
Entry filed under: Democrats, Including Blue Dogs & "Liberals", Republicans, Including Wingers & "Moderates", Sex. Tags: .
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed