Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
If William Bennett wants to gamble, fine. But he and his fellow clay-footed morality scolds should let the rest of us enjoy our harmless vices.
May 9, 2003 | Bill Bennett's a big man. He acknowledged this week that his outsize gambling habit didn't jibe with his preaching about morality, so he decided to give up gambling.
He gave up the wrong vice.
At least the high-rolling Man of Virtue had the integrity to admit there's a contradiction between his shrill moral proselytizing and his weakness for casinos, after Newsweek and Washington Monthly revealed that Bennett lost $8 million at slot machines and video poker over a decade (a habit he tried at first to defend by telling reporters "I don't bet the milk money"). It's been fascinating, by contrast, to watch his Republican friends try to deny the conflict. "I'm sure he doesn't regard gambling as a virtue but rather as a rather minor and pardonable vice and a legal one and one that has not damaged him or anyone else," William Kristol rambled in the New York Times.
Kristol had better watch out: In the World According to Bill Bennett, the moral universe he's made a fortune flacking, there's almost no such thing as a "minor and pardonable vice" -- and if there is, the standard isn't whether it's "damaged him or anyone else." That's exactly the kind of moral relativism -- used in defense of recreational pot smoking, for example -- that Bennett says has ruined America, and if Kristol continues that sort of reasoning he won't receive his inscribed copy of "The Book of Virtues II."
Republicans have rushed to defend Bennett at least in part because liberals, they say, are out to get him. "The left is going to use Bennett's gambling to try to drive him out of public life," Jonathan V. Last wailed in the Weekly Standard. Jon, you've got us confused with your team -- it was Bill O'Reilly who said Salon's Gary Kamiya "had no place in the public arena" because of his views about President Bush and the war. Bennett can stay in public life as far as I'm concerned, but he should wear a big hypocrite sign whenever he wants to declaim about other people's morals. And so should most of his friends in the morality-cop wing of the Republican Party.
Last is right about one thing: Liberals have enjoyed Bennett's moment of shame. It's true -- from stories about cross-dressing closet-case J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy's gay bully boy Roy Cohn, through the exposure of right-wing adulterers like Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Newt Gingrich and Helen Chenoweth during the Clinton impeachment crisis -- yes, we love this stuff. The recent conviction of Clinton hater Richard Delgaudio on child pornography charges was too gruesome to glory in, but we harbor petty fantasies, fantasies that are beneath us, really, about the day to come when the secret life of anti-gay Sen. Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum -- the man who believes we have no constitutional right to privacy, who thinks John F. Kennedy made a mistake separating his Catholicism from his politics, a man President Bush believes is "inclusive" -- is finally revealed.
I know, it's wrong to wish humiliation on Santorum. I don't, really; I pray he can live up to his ultra-Catholic code of conduct. But it's a fact that some of the folks most obsessed with legislating against our darker impulses turn out to be the most gripped by them. Even worse, though, are the ones who aren't gripped by moral obsession but go along for the ride anyway -- like the fornicating futurist Newt Gingrich, the Georgia sophisticate who called Clinton a "misogynist," and hitched his political career to the Christian Taliban out of opportunism, not conviction. (He obviously doesn't believe adultery and divorce, at least, are wrong -- he cheated on and dumped not one but two wives.)
Either way, whether they're driven by their own demons or by political calculations, the moral failings of these clay-feet Republicans is news, or should be, because they've set themselves up as the arbiters of a moral life, and their fatuous preaching has huge consequences for the country. Liberals are going to be all over these stories, and they ought to be -- and there will be plenty more of them, count on it -- until Republicans give up their disgraceful addiction to the politics of sanctimony and scapegoating that its electoral alliance with the Christian right requires.
Let's linger on Bill Bennett for a moment. Now it's true that Bennett, the sly devil, never inveighed against gambling. But his partners in Christian finger-pointing sure think his secret vice is immoral. Former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed called gambling "a cancer on the American body politic" that was "stealing food from the mouths of children." During the 2000 presidential campaign Republican candidate Gary Bauer denounced gambling because it "destroys marriages and families, discourages hard, honest work and increases crime," and he vowed to curb the spread of legal gambling. Bennett's own group Empower America also opposes the spread of legalized gambling. (How interesting that Bauer and Empower America only want to curb its spread, not ban it. Maybe they knew a Bill Bennett who couldn't legally gamble would be a cranky Bill Bennett indeed.)
Then there's Focus on the Family's James Dobson, a staunch gambling opponent who proclaimed in 1999 that "Gambling fever now threatens the work ethic and the very foundation of the family," whose group calls gambling "morally bankrupt from its very foundation." Dobson went so far as to attack his friend Gary Bauer, with whom he authored his alarmist book, "Children at Risk," for supporting John McCain when Bauer dropped out of the GOP race, at least in part because McCain took money from the "gambling industry." But Dobson and Bennett are buddies, too. Bennett wrote the introduction for "Children at Risk"; last August he and Dobson co-wrote an Op-Ed demanding that the "U.S. administration must take Israel's side."
You have to wonder about their relationship. Did Bennett ever have a late-night heart-to-heart with his pal the preacher? "Jim, maybe you oughta think twice about this gambling thing. It doesn't hurt anybody, as long as they don't bet the milk money."
That's Andrew Sullivan's fantasy. Bennett, he insists, "has done nothing hypocritical. Only in the minds of a few religious fanatics, has he done anything immoral." But Sullivan -- and this is what separates him from the total right-wing apparatchiks -- does pause to acknowledge that Bennett was one of the anti-Clinton extremists who "relentlessly" assaulted the president's character. "Some of the rhetoric went [too far] and Bennett clearly egged it on," Sullivan admits. He also notes that Bennett never bothered to contradict his Christian right friends when they fulminated about the evils of gambling. "I wish he'd turn his attention to some of the extremist moralizing among his allies on the far right. Sometimes it takes being a victim of their tirades to see where they're coming from."
But of course -- like Sullivan's wish that President Bush would denounce Rick Santorum for his nasty anti-gay remarks -- that didn't happen. Bennett's going to stay on Dobson's side of the culture war, not Sullivan's. In fact, my fantasy about Santorum's secret life one day being revealed is far more likely to come true than Sullivan's dreams of Bush and Bennett renouncing the politics of homophobia and theocracy. But comforting delusions die hard.
