END OF FAMILY VALUES?

One of the ideals of conservatism has been family values.  Now two of the lastest presidents having multiple "affairs", one even an affair while in office and one even during the campaign for office.  Curiously, the sexual pecidillos of our president don't seem to bother conservatives, not even the religious right.  It looks like family values as an issue is over.

In 1998, the professional moral scold William
Bennett published a book titled “The Death of
Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on Amer-
ican Ideals.” In it, Bennett described blasé atti-
tudes toward presidential adultery as corro-
sive. Clinton’s promiscuity, he argued, impli-
cated his fitness for governing: “Chronic in-
discipline, compulsion, exploitation, the easy
betrayal of vows, all suggest something
wrong at a deep level — something habitual
and beyond control,” he wrote.*

I was reminded of Bennett’s words by David
Friend’s fascinating recent book, “The Naug-
hty Nineties: The Triumph of the American
Libido,” about the sexual scandals and cultur-
al upheavals of that decade. In retrospect, the
dynamics of the Clinton-era culture wars seem
blissfully simple, pitting a sexually libertarian
left against an aggressively prudish right. It is
a cosmic irony that, 20 years later, it is con-
servatives who’ve finally killed off the last re-
maining unspoken rules about presidential
sexual ethics.*

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported
that, a month before the 2016 election, Donald
Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen arranged a
$130,000 payout to the porn star Stephanie
Clifford, known by the stage name Stormy
Daniels, to stop her from discussing a 2006
dalliance with Trump. The New York Times
added new details. The Daily Beast then re-
ported that another porn actress, Jessica
Drake, who had accused Trump of offering
her $10,000 for sex, signed a nondisclosure
agreement barring her from talking about
the president.*

In any other administration, evidence that
the president paid hush money to the star of
“Good Will Humping” during the election
would be a scandal. In this one it has, so
far, elicited a collective shrug.*

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/opinion/president-porn-star-stephanie-clifford.html