Monkey Business and Moral Panic

The year was 1873, the beginning of the American Gilded Age. The nation was exhausted by the Civil War. Robber barons were stealing public lands, importing cheap workers from abroad to build (and die on) the railroads, committing bank and securities fraud, and hiring thugs to beat up the newly organizing labor unions. The nation's economic structure was shifting from a very rough equality to an hourglass, with most of the wealth up top and most of the people on the bottom.

In response to all this economic dislocation and misery, at least one reformer knew exactly how to restore America's moral greatness. At Anthony Comstock's urgings, Congress made it a federal crime to send "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material (i.e., pamphlets about contraception or sexually transmitted disease, condoms, "French" playing cards) through the U.S. mail.

Comstockery is alive and well in today's United States. When citizens distract themselves from economic disruption by focusing not on common matters of public policy but on personal matters of sexual purity, social historians call it a "moral panic" -- and, from the Starr report, which almost cost us a president, to the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, the U.S. has had a runaway panic on its hands for at least a decade. Unfortunately, American journalism is making it worse -- in part by covering precisely the wrong stories about sex and politics.

Since Senator Gary Hart's infamous monkey business in the 1980s, there have been plenty of discussions about where the serious media should draw the line on coverage of public officials' sexual behavior. When is a scandal merely voyeurism, and when is it an invitation for investigative journalism? In theory, most of us agree: on the one hand, the media should never cover consensual and private adult behavior, even when it might seem unsavory. On the other, the media should always cover coercive or criminal behavior, especially when it abuses public power or reveals official hypocrisy. But in practice, for the last decade, the American media have been getting it backward.

Consider the appalling fact that only The Nation has given real coverage to serious allegations against Dr. David Hager, President Bush's controversial appointee to the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. According to the reporter Ayelish McGarvey, in October 2004 Hager took the pulpit at Kentucky's Asbury College chapel and told churchgoers that he had been persecuted for standing up on "moral and ethical issues in this country," persecution that was part of "a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians."

Here's what he meant: many people had opposed his appointment as the panel's chairman because he had worked with Concerned Women for America to block distribution of RU-486, the "morning after" birth control pill. While Hager did not become chairman, he was appointed to the committee, where, he boasted from the same pulpit, he had been influential in blocking over-the-counter distribution of RU-486. In May 2005, The Nation published McGarvey's article, in which Hager's ex-wife, Linda Carruth Davis, alleged that, during the years that he had been crusading to restrict women's medical choices, he had been raping her repeatedly, anally and painfully, often while she was drugged into sleep by prescriptions for a neurological problem. When McGarvey contacted him, Hager would not deny the allegations.

No other media outlet ran with this story. Yet anyone -- especially any public official -- who cannot respect another human being's bodily integrity can and must be called to account. Such acts matter still more when there's an intellectual link between the public figure's attitudes and behaviors and the public policies he promotes. That's precisely the case for Hager, who -- if the allegations are true -- publicly worked to deny women the right to make choices in their medical lives, while privately denying his wife choices about her physical life.