[This essay may not appeal to an audience focused on New Hampshire political issues, but I believe the issues discussed therein deserve a serious national, state and local discussion. In fact, I think it merits discussion in the most important locality we all know: our own hearts.]

The news cycles pass over so fast we often don't have time to process what we need to process. After former Governor Eliot Spitzer's indiscretions were publicized, we were inundated with other news, including the recent revelation that Mr. Spitzer's successor is also guilty of adultery, even serial adultery.

But I feel it's important to examine some of the moral issues that may be buried in the Eliot Spitzer story. Part if not all of Mr. Spitzer's story has indeed been buried by the media avalanche which is the Barack Obama/Rev. Jeremiah Wright insanity, but that will not shake our resolve to look more closely at the underbelly of American sexual obsession and addiction.

For clearly this Spitzer tale is about obsession and addiction in more places than in Mr. Spitzer's personal and public life. American AND European media, and their consumers, are also obsessed with sex, sex scandals and the like; and not a few -- whether media producer or consumer, it matters not -- are addicted to sex as commodity, often in its most salacious forms.

Let us take note of something curious. There is a rather pervasive idea that sexual sins are private matters. One never heard the end of this particular defense when President Clinton was in office. In fact, the rather glibly spoken trope that Clinton's private life was irrelevant to his role as president was trundled out even before he was elected. And Eliot Spitzer tried to remind us all, in his resignation speech, that his sin, too, was private.

I am not here to quibble with the privacy defense, other than to point out that it is rotten and foolish to the core. What I am here to note is how our culture simply does not believe this sort of thing at all. We are a prurient and voyeuristic lot, perhaps so empty of soul and spirit that we are titillated by the sights and sounds of others' titillation. Privacy be damned!

How else to explain that thoroughly inhuman evil, the sudden interest in finding the prostitute with whom Mr. Spitzer had his dalliance? How else to explain that pornographers, like Penthouse and Hustler, want to PAY this prostitute to expose her body for their probing, salacious eyes?

It's amazing that so many folks can take the high road against those men who have sinned with prostitutes, and yet are curiously silent when those same prostitutes are paraded nude through video and print so they may incite lust and lubricity among tens of thousands. It is wrong, no doubt, for Mr. Spitzer to use prostitutes; but it is, apparently, OK for the snickering masses who denounce him (and men like him) as hypocrite to later go and salivate and secrete at the sight of the same exploited prostitutes in magazines and movies. Remember tele-evangelist Jim Bakker's 'paramour,' Jessica Hahn? Sure you do. Perhaps you remember her from her Playboy pictorials and videos that followed that scandal.

And one can never forget the great fall of that other tele-evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart, who was busted frequenting a prostitute not so he could have intercourse with her, but so he could watch her in various poses in order to whet his beastly appetites. Recall the great hue and cry over this scandal; recall the righteous multitudes denouncing (rightly so) the flagrant hypocrisy of Mr. Swaggart. "How could men of such allegedly high moral standing fall to such depravity?" many of us asked.

Curiously, that was about as deep a moral question we could ask, because our culture went suddenly silent as Mr. Swaggart's prostitute posed in Penthouse, hovering over the camera to reveal to the world how she serviced Mr. Swaggart's lust (yes, I saw that issue years ago, when I visited the men's room -- there was a stack of magazines -- at a tire warehouse while waiting for my company truck to be fixed). No one seemed to care that this bit of 'journalism,' too, was a form of prostitution (as is all pornography), or that millions of men were consuming in public print what had been so roundly condemned only weeks before when Mr. Swaggart's 'private sin' was a headline.

Again, I am not a person who stands on high ground in this matter. Ever since I was shown my first Playboy when I was about to enter the 6th-grade, pornography has been a difficult temptation for me (as it is for millions of men). It is, indeed, an addictive product, and pornography's peddlers know it. It is also a gross product, and it is every bit as immoral and empty as prostitution. Gratefully, I have been spared the greater temptations: I've never been to a strip club (and I pray I never will), nor have I ever sought the comforts of a prostitute. But this is more a function of God's grace, and not any function of my personal constitution.

Let me put it this way for anyone who does not get the power of the visual image for men. Please note the next time you drive down the freeway: notice the chrome, two-dimensional silhouettes of women, bearing virtually NO RESEMBLANCE to any woman in three dimensions, that are affixed to mud flaps on tractor-trailer trucks. Why are those there? In part, they are there to incite lust among an invisible fraternity of men: it is code that hot babes are what all men crave. It is a reminder of sex, of copulation; it is really a subconscious trigger reminding men they are designed to fertilize (a compulsion that never really sleeps). And it is a reminder that men, too, are reduced to sex objects, susceptible to the slightest temptations.

Think, then: if mere chrome stickers are known to trigger something in the brain of a man, how much more powerful the images of women on the cover of Cosmo, or in the newest Victoria Secret catalog? (And why do you think so many TV news shows have gorgeous anchors? We all know the answer, but think what it means: men can hardly go ANYWHERE where they can get a break from being reminded of what they "really want.")

Many men know that they've been trained by peer support, and the Madison Avenue push of high couture and sexually suggestive advertising, to become visual predators, stalking women they pass with their eyes, women they might see for but a moment. I have talked with enough men to know that this is indeed a real problem; I have sat in cafés, or in my car on a busy street; I have watched men in the fitness club, and I have seen how they move their eyes: I HAVE SEEN HOW THEY CAN'T HELP THEMSELVES. Some men will walk out of their way while grocery shopping to catch a glimpse of the woman they spotted at the end of aisle 3.

It is, in fact, a nightmare for many of us. And I have not even touched on the fact that the internet is in our homes allowing us access to the world's darkest imagery. (And the technology is still in its primitive form.)
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How is it not a matter of broad cultural denunciation that the pornography/news/internet industries are trying to find Eliot Spitzer's prostitute so they can exploit her (of course, they'll compensate her handsomely) again and again and again; so that they can use her body to exploit millions of men for financial gain? And think of the motive, which is not mere profit: the idea is to show her naked wonders solely to judge them, to see if she is "worthy," to see if she is "hot" enough -- or not. This is precisely why images of Mr. Spitzer's prostitute have been shown on even the pages of the New York Times; editors and readers -- and I've already heard radio comments along these lines -- are responding to the pictures with a "would YOU spend $5000 to have sex with ... this?" The very reductionism should send us out in the streets in riotous rage.

But it won't, and it doesn't. We are too dulled, too inured, to care. We can't think of it; we just leave this all to 'privacy' and 'free speech' and 'market forces' (and, for not a few, 'boys will be boys' and even 'female empowerment' are suitable excuses).

We are fools, killing ourselves, our souls; we are grinding all that is romantic and beautiful and transcendent about sex beneath our feet, grinding it into a mundane mash of culturally permitted abuse. We denounce on Monday morning what we condone Monday night; and we do not care, really, that there are millions of men and women, men like me, women like you, who are imprisoned (or have been), or will be imprisoned, by the trappings of pornography, prostitution, and all other forms of sexual oppression.

The deep cultural hypocrisy is seemingly insurmountable. It is, in the end, like a pervasive blindness, a narcotic that has stolen our time and killed our inability to feel what is perhaps our most noble emotion: moral outrage.

'Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.'

Peace to you.

Bill Gnade