Adam J. Smith, DRCNet Associate Director
This week, while the House continued to debate articles of impeachment against the President, Bob Livingston, the speaker-elect, announced that he had been unfaithful to his wife of 33-years, conducting a long-term affair. Livingston indicated that his revelation came under pressure from unnamed people who had been "investigating" him, and vowed that he would nevertheless be undeterred from his duty regarding impeachment.
Bob Livingston was not the first member of Congress to make an embarrassing admission during this process, and the rumors around Washington are that as the process continues, more will follow. It may be that there are people who are loyal to the President, perhaps people in the administration itself, who are attempting to use the dark secrets of President Clinton's Republican inquisitors against them in an effort to swing votes.
These admissions in advance of imminent disclosure are nothing new. Several years ago there were a rash of admissions, by then-speaker Newt Gingrich and Vice President Al Gore among others, to "youthful experimentation" with marijuana. Now it's sex.
The problem here is not that our elected leaders are human, or even somewhat twisted, as no doubt some of them are. The problem is that despite their own "indiscretions," these people insist upon passing laws regulating, even prohibiting the private consensual behavior of others. And they are willing, even eager to see that the private conduct of American adults be punished, and punished severely.
Last year in America, approximately 600,000 people were arrested for the possession of marijuana. Tens of thousands of others were arrested for the possession of other banned substances. The majority of those people had not harmed anyone, save arguably themselves. And every year, from Capitol Hill, bastion of morality and virtue, comes the call for harsher sentences, more prisons and greater police powers in order that the state might better find, sentence and incarcerate these wayward Americans to the satisfaction of our elected hypocrites.
No one, of course, is kicking in the doors of our legislators, or of their well-to-do neighbors, in the hopes of finding some forbidden substance. In fact, none of the members of Congress, nor their social and economic peers, have much to worry about at all from the state-sponsored terrorism masquerading as vice-law enforcement. Any invasion of privacy that they suffer now is borne solely of their own volitional rise to public office, and the circus that they have created of our political reality. The laws they pass are for other people. Those of us not upstanding or trustworthy enough to determine what is best put in our bodies, or to hold public office.
We have come to a point in our history when our leaders pass laws which punish humanity itself, with the full force of the prison state behind them. And the full knowledge that they themselves, and many of their friends and colleagues, would fail the test of their own punitive puritanism if only they were subject to its dictates. Today, in Washington DC, our leaders are grudgingly confessing to things that would otherwise become public anyway. These are the same leaders who, with righteous indignation and contempt for the weakness of others, have declared war on the private, consensual acts of the citizens of this nation. These leaders are sinners beyond redemption. Not for being human, with all of the messiness that the condition entails, but rather for having the nerve to legislate while shamelessly pretending that they're not.
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| Issue #71, 12/18/98 Diana McCague Sentenced for Syringe Exchange | Action Opportunity: Protest on Steps of New Jersey Statehouse | Bills Seeking to Decriminalize Marijuana, Legalize Medical Marijuana and Legalize Hemp Cultivation to be Introduced in New Hampshire Legislature in 1999 | Patient Who Was Denied Liver Transplant For Using Medical Marijuana Dies | Media Spotlight: Drug Smuggling by US Marines a Growing Problem | Editorial: Unrighteous Indignation |
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StoptheDrugWar.org: the Drug Reform Coordination Network (DRCNet)
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