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Mar
12
[WARNING: Profanity at the end.]
Seriously. This article’s ridiculous details [thank you, Rupert Murdoch] show just how stupid people are to think that what goes around isn’t going to come to them for making hay with this stuff. Say Eliot Spitzer deserved it all you want – that does not necessitate or justify grave dancing. Shame, really, really shame. There’s nothing newsworthy in that article – not one single thing.
Remember when Stephanie Studebaker dropped out? I was checking the court proceedings and Google Alerts and blogging about it – I was even writing people who had worked with her to better understand what had happened. The areas of domestic violence and physical and emotional abuse are ones I’ve worked in since the late 1980s. But people said stop, and I did.
Again, people are going to roll their eyes and cry that his ego says it’s okay, that his hunts after wrong-doers or the alleged say it’s okay, that it’s no one’s fault but his own. People will then say that he was so extreme in all that, that it’s okay.
Believe what you want, but if you are human, and especially if you have a wife, a mother, sisters or daughters, pursue your prurient needs in private and let Spitzer twist in the public wind until the voters cut him loose or he does it himself.
I do not need to know whether or not he wore condoms during his trysts. For God’s sake.
Pffft.
Some people are really sick f…s.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 7:27 am March 12th, 2008 in Blogging, Campaigning, Government, Law, Media, Politics, Scandal, Social Issues, Voting, Women
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6 Responses to “Dumb and Dumber: Eliot Spitzer and grave-dancers”
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Jill, I have a more generic question that’s not specific to the Spitzer case. Should johns be prosecuted? Or should just the prostitutes? Or is it silly to even have anti-prostitution laws on the books in the first place? I visited your blog to see if you had a post on such a topic, thinking you might have opined on the selective prosecution of individuals accused of such activity, wondering whether there is something sexist about how such laws are enforced, or whether such laws ought to be scrapped as worthless since they aren’t uniformly enforced, much like prohibition laws had to be scrapped on the same grounds. What do you think?
Oh Death where art thy sting? Oh grave thy victory?
Here lay the life of Eliot Spitzer, the hypocrite, hoisted by his own petard.
Yeah – whatever – I just finished reading this article and my quick analysis is: it’s not the bravado etc. crap. The guy felt that he’d let people down and he was a screw-up anyway and that this kind of mistake would seal the image that only he saw but that he thought others should know too.
Ego? Weak ego.
This couple is going to survive. He wanted out, he needed out. He may come to realize and his wife will come to realize that as much as he might have needed a different kind of woman to have unbridled ambition and support, he fell in love with and married and committed to a different kind of person and he must have felt enormous guilt that here she was, giving up what she did, for him to become governor and now, he was totally screwing it up.
That the liaisons may have been going on longer? We don’t know yet.
But nevertheless – the guy needed a safety valve that shows that he’s not perfect or can’t be perfect all the time – being a “bad boy” this way was how he chose to do it. Totally selfish but not victimeless – I do not know why Dershowitz or anyone else says that – that is just plain wrong.
Daniel – first, I apologize for my over-active spam-catcher. I don’t know if it’s the comments, the posts or the program!
Here are the questions you asked: “Should johns be prosecuted? Or should just the prostitutes? Or is it silly to even have anti-prostitution laws on the books in the first place?”
They are all reasonable questions that other people are asking. None of them are simple questions with simple answers.
Why not?
First of all, because we’re in an era that’s been dominated by legislating behavior, more perhaps than any other time, but that’s not new – prohibition and the Mann Act itself show that.
We have to understand and think about why we criminalize anything. Have you followed this case of a Chicago mom who had a 2 year old sleeping in the car, she got out with her other kids to put money that they’d saved to give to Salvation Army into the Salvation Army buckets. It was a cold yucky day according to her, she put her lights on flasher, locked the car, had the keys with her, went just a few feet where she could still see the car and was arrest and now faces a year in jail if convicted.
Now – I am not defending what she did – but where are our priorities? Where is our common sense?
What if Spitzer wasn’t married and was a single guy who didn’t want relationships and so depended on sex for $5000 a pop with call girls? And let’s say those women were fine with it? Would that be okay?
Well – as a woman, I’m damned for supporting a yer and I’m damned for supporting a no. But I’ll be judged either way, won’t I?
The bottom line is: for all of evolution, we still don’t know what humanity really consists of – marriage or no marriage? with people of the same sex, or not? children being raised by two parents, one parent, two mothers, two fathers – what?
So – it’s hard for me to give a straight up answer – because I really don’t have one. I can’t be more honest than that.
What do you think?
I’m mulling over whether prostitution should be criminal or not. I think pimping (compelling prostitution or human trafficking or whatever you want to call it) should definitely be a felony, no matter what. A madam or brothel owner, if they, as boss, set working hours for prostitutes, require them to service people that the prostitutes don’t want to service, demand that they offer certain sex acts that the prostitutes don’t want to offer, and assign production quotas to prostitutes, then I think that would constitute pimping. But . . . an adult who works for themselves as a prostitute without being compelled by any other party I think should only rise to the level of a misdemeanor if we, the people, choose to criminalize it. If we, the people, decide that prostitution is criminal, then johns shouldn’t be let off the hook. Since it currently is a criminal activity, then I don’t approve of the seemingly selective enforcement that we currently experience.
The Mann Act ought to have differing degrees of severity. Human traffickers should be guilty of felonies, but a prostitute meeting a john of her own volition,even when crossing state lines, shouldn’t be construed as a violation of the Mann Act.
Structuring finances in order to sidestep reporting requirements . . . hmmm . . . that’s an even more difficult one to mull over, especially since the money Spitzer around was his own money that was earned honestly rather than money from ill-gotten gains, and who is the government to stick their noses into how one moves their own money around? The tricky thing is, the honestly earned money was ill-spent. Hmmm . . .
I like your analysis, Daniel, in that you don’t really leave any loose threads and it’s more or less reasonable.
It seems as though for you the criminality of the behaviors isn’t so much related to any mores but rather to duress, pressure, making people do things against their will, is that accurate?