COMMENTARY: Clinton’s problem is our problem as well

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.) UNDATED _ It is said that Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, advised his sons that what matters […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ It is said that Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, advised his sons that what matters most in life”is not what you are, but what people think you are.” So appealing, apparently, was this counsel that two generations later, Bill Clinton _ a Kennedy wannabe _ has made it his stock-in-trade.


Make no mistake: Anyone who can repeatedly parse definitions and split verbal hairs the way Clinton has is duplicitous in the extreme. In contrast to Jesus’ admonition in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:37), his”yea”doesn’t really mean”yea”and his”nay”is not quite”nay.” Yet, as recent events have shown, the president is hardly the only prominent figure to lead a double life. Ironically, these revelations came from Clinton’s friends and foes alike.

Earlier this month, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., a longtime critic of the president, confessed to fathering a child during an extramarital relationship that occurred during the 1980s. Less than a week later, Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, another Clinton opponent, revealed she had conducted a long-term affair with a married man some 16 years before.

Curiously, in explaining their relationships, both Burton and Chenoweth sounded strangely like the president _ characterizing their affairs in personal, moral terms _ even as they sought to distinguish their actions from his.

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Mo., the Rev. Henry J. Lyons, embattled president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, sounded equally Clintonian as he confessed to”serious miscalculations of judgment”before approximately 10,000 people attending that body’s annual convention. A member of his board told reporters earlier that Lyons admitted to an improper relationship with a female denominational official.

Lyons set the tone for his personal confession by introducing a resolution designed to”let the world know that we stand firmly behind”Clinton. Both the resolution and Lyons’ apology were accepted by the vast majority of those in attendance.

One of the disturbing trends about these qualified mea culpas is that each was proffered as a means of damage control after the confessor got caught. Indeed, the Burton confession was widely viewed as a pre-emptive strike, designed to get the jump on an article about Burton set to appear in a future issue of Vanity Fair.

That the truth _ or some carefully spun version of it _ had to be dragged from these leaders is cause for alarm because it demonstrates a clear distinction between the way they live their public and private lives.


Coming from our leaders, such examples suggest none of us is as good as we seem to be. We all have dirty laundry and our consciences are never free.

The result, as the Kennedy quote suggests, is that we live compartmentalized, hypocritical lives. Thus the crisis we face as a nation goes far beyond that suggested by the findings of the Starr report.

Indeed, Bill Clinton is not the only person whose character is being weighed in the balance. Each of us has a place on the scale.

DEA END ATCHISON

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