Sex is new key to ballot-box success, researchers say
It seemed everybody loved Brent Parker.
They had good reason to.
A father of six and grandfather of just as many, the ever-smiling former lawmaker from Wellsville was a model Cache Valley resident. He went to church, paid his dues, served eight years on the Cache County Board of Education, six of those as president, and even led the Utah School Boards Association.
Parker was a darling of the local Republican Party. Honest legislator and family man. His was a perfect picture.
Perhaps, too perfect. Although in the words of an old Aztec verse, “Nothing is so perfect that it does not descend to its tomb.”
Brent Parker descended last week, after Salt Lake City police cited him for trying to solicit sex from an undercover officer posing as a male prostitute. He resigned on Friday, bringing his second term in the Legislature to an abrupt end, and leaving many colleagues confused and
disturbed.
Now his friends have only disbelief and pity to offer.
Listen to Providence delegate Vic Saunders quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune: “Here’s a guy who had a spotless record until yesterday. Now look. It’s a shock.”
Cache County Republican Party Chairman Clair Ellis was also taken aback.
“It was a surprise,” Ellis said. “My immediate reaction was sadness. The party is just sad for Brent, his wife and his family.”
Gabe White, president of College Republicans at Utah State University, met up with Parker recently at a party fund-raiser.
“I sat next to the guy at the Lincoln dinner. Who would have thought he was having those kinds of problems?” he said.
While party members and friends of the family mull over what they describe as a tragedy for the once neat-as-a-new-pin lawmaker, they make one important assertion in his defense: What happened, they say, was part of Parker’s private life, and is therefore a personal matter.
This viewpoint crosses party lines.
“People’s private lives are their own business,” said prominent valley Democrat Thad Box.
That leaves a couple of questions: If a politician’s private life is, in fact, his own concern, then why must he be booted out of office — or deem it necessary to resign — when professionally, his track record may have been flawless? And why has there been such a muted reaction from local Republicans on Parker’s alleged sexual exploits, when similar behavior on the Democratic side may have been met with harsh criticism?
The answers, according to political analysts, are embedded deep in the country’s social fabric and reveal an important shift in the way people vote. The “morality gap” is fast becoming a key variable in American politics.
The politics of sin and sex
In his passionate and insightful book, “Hellfire Nation,” Brown University political science professor James A. Morone argues that although the Constitution of the United States orders a firm separation of church and state, religion is inseparable from governance.
America, he says, has become a nation with the soul of a church. Moral fervor drives politics in the present day.
Author and reporter Thomas Byrne Edsall of The Washington Post agrees. In an article in The Atlantic Monthly, he posits that morality, not economics, is the new determinant in the race for electoral success.
“It is an axiom of American politics that people vote their pocketbooks, and for 70 years the key political divisions in the United States were indeed economic. The Democratic and Republican Parties were aligned, as a general rule, with different economic interests,” Edsall explained. “But over the past several elections a new political configuration has begun to emerge — one that has transformed the composition of the parties and is beginning to alter their relative chances for ballot-box success. What is the force behind this transformation? In a word, sex.”
Sex, Edsall continues, is pitting voters “who believe in a fixed and universal morality against those who see moral issues, especially sexual ones, as elastic and subject to personal choice.”
There are two camps in this struggle: conservative Red America, mostly Republican, and liberal Blue America, mostly Democratic.
Edsall suggests that while the Blue camp is growing, the Reds are in decline.
“Take church attendance. Exit polls in 2000 showed that the more often a voter attended religious services, the more likely he or she would be to cast a ballot for the Republican Party,” he writes. “But long-range trends in religiosity (the term sociologists use for depth or intensity of religiousness), as measured by the National Election Studies polling series on church attendance, do not favor the Republicans. From 1972 to 2000 the proportion of voters who said they attended services every week dropped from 38 to 25 percent.”
On the other hand, the number of people who never go to a church or a synagogue has grown considerably.
“This group, which has become a mainstay of liberal politics, made up just 11 percent of the population in 1972 but 33 percent in 2000,” Edsall wrote.
Clearly, the only way for the Republican Party to ensure future electoral success, outside of waging war, which Edsall quips is “the only thing that trumps sex,” is to tone down its social conservatism when communicating with the public.
Cache Valley Republicans Almost Keeping Pace
Hence, Brent Parker’s sexual indiscretions while in office become a personal matter, not to be thrashed out in public debate.
This reaction exemplifies a national shift in the way the Republican Party addresses traditionally conservative subjects.
Still, partisan politics doesn’t always operate on logic. And while pointing a finger at a fellow party member may be out of the question, valley Republicans don’t pause for breath in suggesting that Democrats needn’t seek political mileage from Parker’s exodus.
“Let’s not even talk about Bill Clinton,” Ellis said.
“Bill Clinton had sex in the White House,” White adds.
Democrats aren’t surprised.
“[The Parker episode] won’t make a bit of difference here,” said John Neuhold of the Democratic Party’s State Executive Committee. “It certainly should, but people here are so engrained in their Republican conservatism. They think the sun rises and sets on them.”
–leon@cc.usu.edu