Image shamelessly pinched from the internet; Kyriosity takes credit in comments.
There isn't any defense. The danger of any comment on the video of Donald Trump's lewd comments is that it will appear to defend him. What he said was gross -- and I just skimmed a story to get the gist. Blech.
When Antonin Scalia died I texted my spiritual director and said, "feels like the Lord has removed his hand of protection from this country and we are in free-fall." As a political matter, maybe this sinks Trump and those in the GOP calling for him to step aside may be right. Whatever the injustice or unfairness of Trump being held to a standard the Clintons aren't held to, I wouldn't want an act of defiance on his part to bring down the whole Congress.
This post, however, is not directly about Trump the man or about what political action is called of us at the moment. It's more me unburdening myself of a frustration, and forgive me if it sounds a bit self-righteous.
I hate Donald Trump's and Billy Bush's conversation; it sickens me. But I'm equally sickened by everyone's horror. When I was in high school, a large percentage of my friends, particularly my guy friends, listened to Howard Stern's radio show every morning. I never listened, but I caught a few moments of his cable tv show later in life and I gather that kind of talk about women was the thing. Stern talked that way about women to their faces -- evaluating their body parts and telling them what he'd like to do to them, and they submitted for publicity's sake. And I gather that male guests just joined Stern in, yes, locker room bragging about their sexual exploits. That was the show, and it was celebrated -- enough for Stern to go from radio to cable tv to a movie about his life.
My friends -- even some of my pious Christian friends-- watch and celebrate Game of Thrones, which features graphic depictions of the demeaning of women and everyone else, I gather. Rap lyrics celebrate the assault of women all day long -- and these artists are feted on our talk shows and invited to the White House.
Bill Maher, hero to the Left (and to some of the Right for his straight talk about Islam), speaks foully and celebrates his hanging out at the Playboy Mansion, where people are known to behave in the way Trump describes, and that is perfectly cool. And people like Ann Coulter are friends with him.
President Kennedy joked about his presidency being like a golf course; I will spare you the foul punch line if you don't already know it. Senator Kennedy was caught in flagrante delicto drunk and palming waitresses all the time. Bill Clinton is a known sexual predator. Joe Biden is often shown on camera being far too handsy with pretty women.
The progressive culture advocates teaching kids to talk in vulgar ways about their sexuality from the time of kindergarten so they'll be sex-positive. This Administration has launched an all-out legal assault on chastity such that any instance of pure living must be wiped out -- yea, verily, even unto the Little Sisters of the Poor: You, who are consecrated to being a sign in the world of the glory for which men were created and are destined? You will bend to the sexual revolution and finance it.
The Washington Post, on this very morning when it is tut-tutting over Trump's words, also runs a piece lamenting the shutting of a brothel, where women are treated precisely the way Trump's words treat them.
I hate this gross culture that demeans women and sex. It makes me feel sick to my stomach when I think about young men steeped in this sick culture going anywhere near my daughter, who is the most beautiful soul on earth -- or anyone else's daughter. But I hate even more the even grosser culture of the Lie where someone like Hillary Clinton or people like the editorialists of WaPo and the Formerly Grey Lady get to point their fingers and pretend they didn't create and celebrate the culture in which Mr. Trump merely partakes. These people who celebrate porn and abortion and make heroic figures out of crabbed, small-souled, sex-deluded creatures such as Bill Maher and Lena Dunham and Sandra Fluke and sick men like the Kennedys and Bill Clinton are not merely being hypocrites or playing politics when they denounce Trump. They are self-consciously engaging in a Big Lie: the corruption of meaning itself.
I don't even have an expletive strong enough to express my contempt for what we're witnessing this news cycle. And I deeply resent being put in a position where denouncing the grossness of Trump's remarks is playing into the Big Lie. This is the problem of the corruption of culture, as Harriet Beecher Stowe illustrated brilliantly in Uncle Tom's Cabin, where the good guys who defend human dignity are forced by the culture itself to become outlaws -- to lie or break the law or defend what they ordinarily would find indefensible in order to defend the greater good of human liberty. No one escapes with his purity intact.
