Niall Stanage has a piece up at Salon examining how David Vitter has managed to survive a rather comical sex scandal involving prostitutes and diaper-wearing. He makes a lot of good points about the situation in Louisiana and how Vitter is benefiting, but I think it’s useful to think about why the scandal itself doesn’t seem to hurt Vitter, when other Republicans—-even ones who have straight sex like Mark Sanford and John Ensign—-were so dramatically damaged by falling in the eyes of the “family values” crowd. Stanage addresses these specifics towards the end.
There is another element to Vitter’s resilient popularity worth mentioning: the nature of his offense. His encounter was (presumably) with a woman; the fact that he used an escort agency rather than picking up a prostitute from a street corner; that rumors of other similar episodes have not been substantiated; that he has stayed with his wife and family: All of this probably helps his case seem less egregious than, say, the male restroom arrest that ended Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s career.
“Same-sex [scandal] would be a killer,” Maginiss says. “Or even if there was evidence that this is part of a pattern of continuing behavior—that would be hard to overcome.”
I’m going to take a moment to point out that I’m sure most people, especially evangelical Christians, are probably full well aware that it was not a one-time deal.
Jessi Fischer, a California-based writer on sexuality who blogs as “The Sexademic,” suggests that the contrast between the cases of Vitter and Craig “is significant because when you are talking about people having a kind of moral panic, often what we are talking about is the crossing of boundaries. That could be when the two people are of the same sex, but something like race and the crossing of racial boundaries affects these things as well.”
“You can’t cross too many boundaries at once,” she advises.
I think a lot of this is getting close but missing the point. The question at hand is why Vitter is able to sell himself to “family values” conservatives, and the assumption here is that going to prostitutes is transgressive in a way that it should be especially threatening to them. But I think the problem here is applying liberal values to the situation. But “family values” is really just a euphemism conservatives use for supporting the patriarchy. In this worldview, I’d argue that it’s less of a problem if a man goes to a prostitute than if he does something confusing and emasculating, such as expressing affection for a woman outside of the dutiful bounds of marriage. The fundie worldview, especially, has never been one that pretends that men don’t feel lust. On the contrary, they tend to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are basically uncaged animals who can’t control their own behavior very well, and so society has to do it for them. When you read a lot of evangelical grappling with pornography, this comes across loud and clear. Men who look at pornography are considered “addicted”, and the main concern is that it might weaken the sexual bonds in the marriage and lead to a divorce. I wouldn’t say I see a lack of understanding as to why men would look at porn. In fact, the fundie obsession with eliminating distribution makes it clear that they think men are mostly unable to control themselves. The internet has changed things somewhat; realizing that you can’t stop porn on the internet has made space in the evangelical world to talk about men actually taking self-control. But their preferred worldview is one where men are tempted by sex (not so much by love), and the women who tempt them bear the blame.