Gregory Kane: Elders play fast and loose with morals
This is a case you may have heard about, even if you live nowhere near the city with the nickname “Bodymore, Murderland.”
That would be Baltimore, Md., to the rest of you. We got our less-than-cherished nickname from the cast of assorted miscreants and thug boys shamelessly mugging their way through an underground DVD called “Stop Snitching.” The motley cast boasted about how they would kill snitches, so they’re the appropriate ones to have come up with the nickname. They are, after all, responsible for many of those murders and those bodies.
For years, Baltimore’s number of homicides stayed above 300. We media types figured that was just awful; surely 200 to 250 would be much better. So a city councilman, Martin O’Malley, campaigned for mayor in 1999 on the promise to bring the number of homicides below 300. He got elected.
And, true to his promise, he implemented a zero tolerance policy and got the number of homicides below 300. It took a lot of arrests of people for petty crimes to do it, but O’Malley got it done. He’s now governor of Maryland.
Sheila Dixon, president of the Baltimore City Council when O’Malley was mayor, succeeded him as the city’s chief executive. She implemented a policy that got the number of homicides lower than even under O’Malley’s administration, sans the massive arrests and violation of civil liberties. Some say she’s a better mayor than O’Malley was.
Too bad she’s on trial this week for stealing gift cards intended for the poor.
But that’s not what bothers me about her case. Earlier this week the judge presiding over her trial dismissed two theft counts because he said it wasn’t clear if the gift cards were meant for Dixon or the poor. But the judge, Dixon, the media, indeed an entire city somehow are missing an 800-pound gorilla sitting smack dab in the middle of the room.
Dixon prides herself on being a churchgoing woman; she attends services every Sunday at Baltimore’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her defense attorneys — there are at least six —have a slew of character witnesses set to testify about Dixon’s high moral fiber.
Mind you, we’re talking about a woman who, as city council president, accepted gifts — those gift cards were among them — from a contractor who did business with the city. Said contractor was married at the time, and not to Dixon.
What part of devout, churchgoing Christian woman computes with having an affair with a married man? Am I missing something here?
I used to joke that I was on the losing side of the sexual revolution. These days, that joke isn’t so funny. We didn’t just have a sexual revolution; we had a revolution that has, seemingly, turned many of the moral standards we did have completely on their heads.
Dixon’s defense essentially boils down to this: Yes, I’m a devout, churchgoing, Christian woman. My religion explicitly forbids me to engage in either adultery or stealing. I willingly engaged in one but would never, never, in my wildest dreams think about doing the other. And I’ve got witnesses who’ll testify to that.
For years Baltimore had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. A former writing student of mine did a paper about tutoring girls of middle school age who boasted of having sex, and blew off chances of getting pregnant by casually saying “We’ll just get an abortion.”
With leaders like the ones Baltimore has as role models, it’s hard to blame such girls for being totally lacking in values. They’ve surely noticed how their elders have ratcheted down moral values, especially as they relate to sexual matters, over the years.
You may remember the president we had known as Bill Clinton. (My apologies to those of you who may be trying to blot the man’s memory out of your minds.) You may also recall the reasoning his defenders used after he got impeached: that his only offense was having an intern perform oral sex on him in the White House.
That was NOT Clinton’s offense; he was charged with perjury and subornation of perjury, but the message was clear. His adultery, his supporters claimed, was no big deal. Neither, apparently, were his perjury or subornation of perjury.
I wish Dixon well in her trial, but I wish even more she’d shut her mouth when it comes to defending or excusing her actions.
