COLUMN: "Public People, Private Lives"

From Jennifer Kornreich's "The Devil Made Me Do It," Spring '92 The presidency is a job. As with any other job, assessing individuals for the duties of the position based on their private vices is both unfair and foolish. Just because someone does something ethically dubious in his personal life does not indicate that he will extend his lack of propriety to the public sphere, where he knows the stakes are higher and he'll much more likely be caught. All too often, we fail to distinguish between behavior that is merely "not nice" and behavior that is tantamount to crime. And that is exactly what we are doing if we reject Clinton or anyone else on such a basis as his marital woes or sex life. Okay, fine, adultery is technically illegal. But so are blow jobs in certain states, and we all know how much that's enforced. Let's confine judgment to illegalities that are detrimental to the public. Unfortunately, this blurring of the distinction between privately (un)acceptable behavior and publicly (un)acceptable actions is one of the most dangerous consequences originating from the current "political correctness" movement. Where healthy awareness and debate of various attitudes and actions should be fostered, P.C.ers have instead made "correctness" the focus. They use a candidate's personal ethics rather than his adherence to public standards as a measure of his ability to govern. All that is really important in evaluating a candidate are those behaviors and values that do affect the public -- that is, his stance on the various issues of the campaign and his ability to serve as a political leader. Not as a moral paradigm; I have Mother Teresa for that. (Actually, I don't even attempt to emulate her, but you get my drift.) So what if Clarence Thomas did tell Anita Hill that he thought there was a pubic hair on his Coke? So what if he did muse upon Long Dong Silver's endowments in front of her? How far do we take this? Should I condemn an employer who says "fuck" in my presence as guilty of harassment? These are words - offensive words, perhaps, but words nevertheless. Not actions. If we waited for a politician who's never had extramarital sex, who's never smoked a joint, who's never imbibed alcohol underage, who's never joked about a Long Dong Silver porno flick, etc., we would indeed be like the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who searched in vain for a completely honest man. And aside from the infinitesimal likelihood of finding such candidates, there is no reason why we should feel the need to do so. We may find one or more of the above behaviors morally abhorrent by our own personal standards of conduct -- and by all means, we should not have to condone these transgressions in our own minds. However, for all intents and purposes, they do not have any influence on the candidate's capacity to serve the country and fulfill his prescribed responsibilities. Nor do these personal failings signify any affront to the public welfare. If, instead of adultery, drug and alcohol use and lewd comments, we were talking about rape, driving under the influence and demanding sexual favors from a subordinate -- well, obviously, that's a different story. Then the candidate has committed offenses that have an impact not only on his own life but on those of others. But for Clinton and Thomas, this is not the case. Political candidates aren't the only victims of the P.C. inclination to raise all things immoral to criminal status. Let's take an especially inflammatory issue like rape. Many P.C.ers like to verbally vomit up the insidious notion that if a man at all pressures a woman to have sex, he's a rapist. Now, granted - a man who tries to take advantage of a reluctant partner's emotions and lack of confidence to assert herself is, at the very least, unscrupulous. But is he a rapist? Unless he actually uses coercion, he's not. A man has, and should have, every right to pressure a woman to have sex with him -- just as every woman has the right to refuse his advances. This is no different than an advertising company trying to persuade us to buy a product. It is no different than the person who offers you a drink when you don't really want it and exerts peer pressure. It is our problem if we are not adult enough to withstand the pressure. The P.C. movement, however, would have us believe that just because women -- the often oppressed and subordinated gender -- are concerned, suddenly we should treat a man's personal repugnance toward a woman as a crime against her. Same with sexual harassment. Sure, Thomas is a pig -- but as long as he did not threaten Hill's job if she complained, this is not sexual harassment. It's freedom of speech. And as long as he does nothing criminal, Thomas has the fundamental right to be a pig and still serve on the Supreme Court! Obviously, I'm being facetious. But I'm dead serious about the main point of this whole diatribe. This is not a totalitarian state . . . and once we relegate the matter of someone's personally slimy conduct to the realm of the courtroom or other public damnation, we are in peril of suppressing basic individual rights. For this reason, I don't care to know if Thomas did in fact make repulsive sexual comments to Hill, while she -- out of her own unfounded fears of punishment -- unnecessarily kept her mouth shut for years. That's a problem in his personality. I, for one, would rather know for certain his views on abortion - which will affect us, and had much more bearing on whether he should have been confirmed. Everything else is irrelevant. Jennifer Kornreich is a junior English major from Roslyn, New York. "The Devil Made Me Do It" appears alternate Tuesdays.