UNITED STATES
Chicago Sun-Times
WRITTEN BY NEIL STEINBERG
It stays submerged.
We glimpse it, then turn away as it disappears again. But it always comes back.
A popular TV show implodes. We chatter about its fallen star. No sooner does the scandal start to fade, however, when a new one emerges: this one the former Speaker of the House, accusing of paying a fortune to hush up decades-old accusations.
Dennis Hastert’s cash kept it quiet for years. Josh Duggar, reality TV star of “19 Kids and Counting,” eked out a dozen.
Their secret shame becomes fertile ground for public comment and eventual remorse. Hastert admits no wrongdoing, yet. Duggar does. “I acted inexcusably” he says. And TLC, to its credit, doesn’t excuse him but yanks the hit show amidst generally half indignant, half amused clucking about the frequent hypocrisy of those who flaunt their superior standards.
Each case is easy to chatter about. Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post trenchantly observed how the Duggar crime is “a reminder of how badly the cult of purity lets victims down,” portraying them as ruined bikes, cups of spit, chewed gum, as if their entire value lay in their sexuality. As with priests, when there are no sexual outlets, it’s sometimes sought in the wrong places.”
“When all sexuality is a sin, when even holding hands is off limits, there isn’t a clear line between permissible, healthy forms of exploration and acts that are impermissible to anyone, not just the particularly devout,” she writes. “This gospel of shame and purity has the potential to be incredibly harmful because it does away with important lines.”
True enough. But there’s much more to this than specific scandal, much more than further evidence of how dysfunctional the devout can be. We analyze individual cases, the life of one politician or one TV star, looking from one tree to the next without ever seeing the forest. Without ever realizing we should start talking about the tremendous toll that sexual and physical abuse takes on our general society right now, today, and into the foreseeable future. The true scandal isn’t what Dennis Hastert might have done to boys at Yorkville High School or what Josh Duggar did to five girls. The scandal is how frequently this sort of thing, and far worse, happens.
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