Sanford, Ensign, McNair: Stories of Demon Husbands and Sainted Wives

Here’s a simple moralistic tale: if you’re unfaithful to your wife, the truth will come out, and you will pay the price. The popular media have repeated this tale recently, each time with a different leading character. First was Nevada Senator John Ensign, second South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, and finally retired NFL quarterback Steve McNair. A random set of events among celebrities is ultimately responsible for this thrice-told tale. Random events often occur in streaks. That’s how randomness works, and yet we read into these random streaks some deeper meaning, just as we read animal shapes and faces into passing clouds.

We often have streaks of one kind of moralistic tale or another in the popular media since the media have only several moralistic tales in their repertoire: hard-working, heart-of-gold athlete leads the team to victory, average Joe labors years for his lifelong dream and finally achieves it—you can fill in the others. These tales work because they’re so simple and because they’re designed to grab our emotions. The unfaithful-husband-pays-the-price tale grabs our emotions because it’s about blatant good and evil. The evil, demon husband cheats on the good, sainted wife—end of story. We need to end the story quickly because any facts might muddy the tale. How blatantly evil can one be and still become a senator, a governor, an NFL quarterback, or some other celebrity? Yes, there are deeply flawed personalities who make it big in America—Nixon is a case in point—but I imagine such cases are are not the rule.

Let’s look at this tale of evil-unfaithful-husband-pays-the-price and ask some questions, not of these three men, but rather of the character or role that was pasted onto these men.

Was the evil man always evil? If so, why didn’t the public know? More important, why didn’t their wives know before they married them? Were these men also evil masters of deception?

Just as women who casually sleep around are sometimes called slutty woman, were these slutty men before they got married? Is a slutty man evil or do slutty habits of thought and action get washed away with marriage the way the soul is washed clean of sin through the waters of baptism? The problem then would be that some slutty men return to their slutty ways after marriage.

Were these men not evil, just narcissistic? Was it a case of their lives starting out as being mostly about themselves, their careers, and their desires and then becoming entirely about themselves, their careers, and their desires—moving from just kinda evil to all evil?

If marriage is a contract entered into knowingly, did these women have no hint of who they were getting hitched to? Or, did these men-with-a-bright-future dazzle their women so much that when the women did the calculus they decided to overlook these men’s ethical deficiencies? Also, were there absolutely no kind, faithful, caring men out there who these women might have chosen over their flawed, men-with-a-bright-future?

Marriage can be hard and complicated. Maybe moralistic tales about failed marriages are appealing because they help us believe, for a little while at least, that marriage is simple and that by comparison ours is doing just fine.