Dr. Keith Ablow, Media Matters' "LGBT Misinformer of the Year," offers a Bluebeard argument for how the Newt's multiple woman make him eminently qualified to be POTUS: if three women in a row fell for him, two of those knowing he was married, he must be full of "emotional energy and intellect."
Well, full of something. And so is Ablow, imho. But whatever both of these gentlemen are full of, it's not the stuff of which leaders building a humane society are made. Not in any shape, form, or fashion.
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, predictably and to his discredit, finds Newt the adulterer just a man. Just a man with a libido like all other men.
And so his former wife is "bitter, bitter, bitter" because she dares to tell the world on the eve of his South Carolina primary race that he wanted an open marriage.
These predictable (and hugely self-congratulatory and self-exculpating) memes of powerful insider men--it's just what men do; it actually proves their manhood and powerful intellects and emotional dominance--are more than a little misogynistic, it seems to me. And more than a little male-entitled.
We need to move beyond these predictable male-entitled forms of political and moral analysis, if we expect ever to become a more humane society. We need to move beyond blaming "bitter" women for decrying the damage male-entitled infidelity does to them. We need to move to a form of social analysis that looks not at the pseudo-biological basis for male infidelity (and the "natural" male right to dominate and use) to social analysis that looks at the unfair ways in which powers is distributed and operates in our world.
We need, in other words, to get outside the confines of the boys' club and realize that the world has a lot more interesting voices in it than the tiny few to which we listen obsessively, inside our privileged male beltway clubs. We need to do this, that is, if we truly expect to build a more humane society for all--gays and lesbians and women included.
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