CLIENT #9 AND SEXUAL FREEDOM

Well, how about that? Another politician "reformer" caught with his pants down. This one was a real surprise, just like good old Senator Larry Wide Stance, who I'd never heard of before his airport men's room fiasco. But now the governor of my home state, New York, has been identified as "Client #9" in a federal investigation of a call girl ring. What's the surprise in Eliot Spitzer using hookers? Not a thing, nothing about human behavior surprises me anymore. The surprise is that the government is still wasting our hard earned tax dollars investigating a victimless crime like prostitution. Is this what they're doing with their broad new wiretapping powers? That's my money and your money they're spending to peek into brothels. What a skin crawling, creepy disgrace! The same with Senator Wide Stance. Who was he hurting looking for love in all the wrong places? Now they're peeking into men's room stalls. That's just gross.

Isn't that bin Laden guy still running around out there, recruiting more terrorists than ever and making more videos than a rap star? And reportedly planning more death and destruction on American soil since our government has sort of left him alone since he was hiding in caves and very hard to find and besides, Afghanistan had no oil to steal. Where's the outrage over that? If Eliot Spitzer wants to part with some of his dough to fool around with a call girl in a French maid's outfit, well, let him! It's nobody's business but his and the hooker. Okay, maybe his wife might chime in with a word of dismay or two, but that's between them. There is no reason for the man to be hounded out of political office because he visited hookers. Can we just grow up around here already?

Now I don't care for Mr. Spitzer all that much, either his personality or his politics. I don't care if he resigns or not but not over something as irrelevant as his sex life. But wouldn't it be refreshing if he told reporters to keep the hell out of his sex life and didn't apologize to anybody but his wife? And kept that little piece of family contrition out of the public eye too. Oh, but he broke the law, you say? He's a baaad man! He's got to crawl to the gates of Rome is sackcloth and ashes for contrition! Nonsense. How long are we going to outlaw the oldest profession? Screw all that Puritan claptrap and legalize what's inevitable and hurts no one. Does anybody think there will be one less assignation between prostitutes and their patrons today because of this news? Even one? I doubt it. People are going to do whatever it is they need to do with sex and there's nothing anyone can do to prevent it. Is that a revelation to anybody at this point in human affairs? Either grown ups are allowed to do stuff like that or nobody can be considered an adult.

I don't care one way or the next about a governor or senator's sexuality, it's more the hypocrisy of some of these politicians that bugs me. Anybody remember Roy Cohn? He was a Republican operative and a crony of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was also chums with Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. See where I'm going here? Anyway, like Mr. Hoover, who liked to dress up in cocktail gowns in his spare time when he wasn't busy trying to control other people's morals, Mr. Cohn had a secret. He was a gay man. No big deal, right? 5% of humanity is gay. But Roy Cohn was a rabid anti-gay crusader. Same with Senator Wide Stance, who was a big proponent of denying gay people the same right to marry the one they love as the rest of us. And then went trolling for gay sex in a public rest room an tried to deny that he did so, not having the balls he was flaunting in the men's room to tell everybody to back off of his private affairs.

Why there were police officers assigned to arrest people involved in this sad, lonely and tawdry exercise is a puzzle. Aren't there any real criminals in Minneapolis-St. Paul these officers could be investigating? And since this took place in an international airport, were there any national security issues involving gay hijackers that they're not telling the public about? Should we be profiling the guy in the lavender sports jacket and silk scarf? You know, that whole if you see something, say something slogan and all that other KGB Big Brother propaganda our government is trying to scare us with. Boy, we'd get a lot of pretty amusing police reports here in New York if that was the case. Maybe even have to add a new color to the Homeland Security alert status like fuscia, salmon or peach. Or create a Department of Homo Security and put our collective homophobia right out in the open, call spade a spade already and stop trying to disguise our bigotry against 5% of our brothers and sisters.

So while that small, petty part of my soul gets a kick out it of when these guys who want to police the rest of us get caught en flagrante, I still say it's a rotten shame that people want to control the sex lives of anybody else but themselves and their partners of choice. Get the hell over it already! Some people are gay, some people like to fool around with prostitutes, and it's none of our damned business! Is anybody less effective at their jobs because of the kind of sex they like? If you don't like what they do, then don't do it! It's just that simple. Who likes being told what they can and can't do that has nothing to do with harming anybody else? There are laws on the books in almost every state outlawing some of the sexual behavior almost everybody enjoys. Why?

What were those legislative sessions like when explicit sexual acts were being discussed? It invokes a pretty creepy mental picture, no? You have to figure that in any given state legislative body there has to be every sort of sexual practitioner represented. Were there somber debates on various sexual practices within the halls of power? Were there passionate defenses of some specific sexual acts by those in opposition to the legislation, not necessarily because they didn't enjoy intruding in citizens' lives but because the sex act in question was their own personal favorite? Did anybody filibuster over oral sex for hours on end? Did they use charts and photos? Slide shows, maybe? Was there a lot of giggling?

Which lawmaker introduced the legislation and for what pressing governmental reason? Were sexual deviants running rampant in the streets and threatening the Republic? And which of these representatives of the people actually wrote these laws? Somebody had to put pen to paper and put down in specific and legal terms just exactly what consenting adults can and cannot do with their own bodies and each other's bodies. That's pretty creepy too. And even if he or she was the most repressed and judgmental killjoy around, didn't they feel guilty paying so much attention and taxpayer money to this tawdry and titillating business at the expense of the legitimate government business they were elected to do? Knowing the arrogance of some of our politicians, I doubt it. Too many of them consider it a good day's work when they have dictated a stringent code of personal behavior to the rest of us, knowing full well they are commanding the tides, and knowing that these laws do not apply to themselves personally, what with them being powerful and all.

So Client #9 and Senator Wide Stance are the latest victims of a climate they supported. Irony is always a beautiful thing. And you have to think of that psychological genius William Shakespeare at times like this with all the hoisting on their own petards and protesting too much done by some of these gaseous hypoctrites. But lets not get all superior and huffy about it. Just because you or I don't patronize prostitutes doesn't mean it's wrong to do so. It's the laws prohibiting prostitution that are wrong. Just because somebody writes and a bill and gets it passed into law doesn't make it automatically right and it doesn't make the act the law makes illegal automatically wrong.

We once had a lot of laws in a lot of states barring racial integration and our federal armed forces were segregated as well. Was that okay? Until less than a hundred years ago women were not allowed to vote. Those were laws of the land, enforceable by the might of the state and they caused no end of trouble in this nation getting them repealed. While prostitution is an unlikely cause to get people marching in the streets, why do we need massive social upheaval to right a wrong? Can't we just recognize that the government has overstepped its authority and quietly change these ridiculous laws? Not to save the careers of the likes of Client #9 and Senator Wide Stance, a pair of two faced liars hoist on their own petards, but simply because it's the right thing to do.

President Truman ended segregation in the armed forces with the stroke of a pen nearly a generation before the rest of the nation got off their asses and corrected the inherent racial inequality that existed in America. It wasn't so easy to bring about Civil Rights in the nation at large but it was done at a great human and spiritual cost. What's it going to take to give gay people those same rights? They pay taxes and are among our most law abiding citizens. Oh, wait, I forgot, they are heinous criminals because by their nature they violate all kinds of laws designed to make them criminals because they practice so-called deviant sex acts that the rest of us do not. Well, so do our Senators and Governors when they visit prostitutes and have same-sex love affairs. Which is completely wrong thinking if you believe in the ideals of America. The way the American government was designed (by better minds than the current caretakers of it) was that the lawmakers don't have the right to approve or disapprove of anybody's religion, politics or personal behavior so long as they are harming no one else.

When human beings start making laws about sex between consenting adults there's always trouble. The former governor of New Jersey, one Jim McGreevey, built a huge fabrication of a life to conceal his true nature and had to resign in disgrace. The disgrace was not what most people think it is, that he was a homosexual. That's a neutral designation and not all that interesting one way or another. The disgrace was that he misled his wife and children and supporters as to his true nature, and misled himself too. Probably in this society he felt compelled to do so in order to succeed and do a great degree was correct in that assessment. That was a huge public scandal and led to his resignation, disgrace and who knows what kind of personal pain for his family. All in all, a tawdry rotten mess.

He did, however, break some real and sensible laws by appointing his male lover to a sensitive governmental position for which he was unqualified, potentially putting the State of New Jersey at risk. He made him the director of New Jersey's Homeland Security at a time when terror threats were real and imminent. New Jersey is the home of some very tempting targets for terrorists and our most densely populated state. To my mind, that was the only thing he did wrong legally and he richly deserved to be removed from office for that offense, not his inherent sexuality or the confused and duplicitous way he ran his personal life. Private matters, those, personal and family issues that are very complex and traumatic and not to be solved by editorials and diatribes. Outside of harming others, legislating morals is a fool's game. What's moral to you may be immoral to your neighbor and vice-versa. Who prevails in that contest, or should there even be such a contest? Putting his state at risk, on the other hand, was a very public matter and one deserving of full public disclosure and whatever subsequent outrage that crime caused.

And now the governor of New York is a criminal in the eyes of many. He's hardly that, but he did show a huge lack of integrity by apologizing for his pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence made a big deal over our right to the pursuit of happiness, and if hookers make the guy happy, well, who's business is that? Client #9 could have landed a big blow for civil liberties if he told us all to get the hell out of his personal business. Bill Clinton made the same mistake when he was called in front of Congress about his sex life. He should have informed that august body that if they were not there to discuss government business then we're done here. When the leader of the free world can't get a blow job without Congress trying to make it their business, there's something fundamentally wrong. Clinton missed a golden opportunity to tell these clowns to keep their vicarious thrill-seeking noses out of other people's pants, and now Client #9 compounds the error.

You're not a good person because you don't engage in things others enjoy, just as they are not necessarily good or bad for not doing what you like to do. If you believe strongly in your way of life and your moral code, well, isn't that enough? Or is your belief so weak that you need the law on your side in order to justify yourself? And if you set the precedent to outlaw the other guy's behavior, than what's to prevent somebody outlawing your behavior? Zero is the answer to that one. What goes around, comes around. That way you become an automatic outlaw like when Rosa Parks sat at the front of the bus or when a child is born homosexual. When you teach your children what you believe you will then become guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and subject to arrest and imprisonment. Do we need to pass another law that exists for the sole purpose of hurting and controlling people? Client #9 will resign and go away without posing any of these questions publicly, more with a whimper than a shout. It's a sad day for freedom.