You guys still don’t get it, do you?
I read with interest some left-wing opinion pieces this week that centered around the notion that Bill Clinton, despite the fact that he was, should have been impeached after all.
His sexual indiscretions rose to that level that, despite the good economy, the Senate should have convicted him and he should have lost his job over his inability to be faithful to his wife. I even read one piece that suggested if Hillary had won last year, would we be seeing all of these women coming out of the woodwork to blame “their” “men”? Or, instead would they have remained silent following the National Organization for Women’s lead for her husband in 1998 who must have decided the assaulted women would just be “collateral damage” for the cause?
Well, if you listened back then to the Democrat ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, all of this was just about sex. The women involved be damned. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) was wrong then, and now everyone trying to get “on the right side of history” can’t find the road that leads there. It’s because they don’t get it—they just don’t know where to look.
President Clinton had admitted to having sex. The impeachment articles, though, were about the fact that he had lied under oath. And, the trial in the Senate wasn’t about sex. Rather, it was about truth.
The question had become even if President Clinton had an inappropriate relationship with an underage intern enamored with his power, and even if he lied about it, wasn’t that something everybody did? The Senate put truth on trial and asked the question, “Since everyone lies about sex, what need be the consequence of our failure to be true?” Should the President lose his job, in this great economy we’re experiencing, over lying about sex? Every Democrat in the Senate said, “No.” Was there not one who sided with the truth? Apparently not.
And the way our government, universities, and the media views truth hasn’t been the same since. Truth had certainly been violated that day, just as much as an aspiring young actress on a casting couch.
You see, sin doesn’t begin when we entrap a young actress or get our photo snapped groping a former Playboy model when she’s sleeping. Sin doesn’t begin when we have an inappropriate conversation with the office secretary at the drinking fountain. Sin begins the moment we determine in our own minds that we are going to ignore what we know to be right and wrong. It’s an intellectual construct. And sin literally is the result of a lost mind. If you are trying to be on the right side of history, that road leads to your mind.[1]
That’s what happened in 2000 when George W. Bush was elected president. In the quiet and privacy of the voting booth, even in the “good economy” post-Bill Clinton era, people grappled with the truth of the previous several years and voted against the Democrat.
That’s what happened last year when two people we knew a lot about—not a lot of it good—were running for President. Good heartland people who would give you the shirt off their backs, who would offer the homeless food on the street, who know what the truth is because they’ve dealt with it in their non-bright-marque-light lives, in the quiet and privacy of the voting booth, even in the everyone-feels-good post-Barack Obama era, grappled with the truth of the last several years and voted against the Democrat.
Philosophy professor agnostics and science professor atheists don’t have to worry about sin, you know. They don’t believe in that make-believe hocus-pocus.
And politicians have been playing fast and loose with the truth for a long time now. Parsing language for an interview or a town hall meeting back home makes you qualified to run for office. And if you run, the media can’t wait to publish the latest he said, she said hit piece on you. Is there any doubt why good people don’t show up to file their candidacy?
And the media would rather talk about sex. It gets you more column inches in the newspaper. The assault on truth? Not so much.
[1] See Romans 1:18.