Should Jenny Sanford Get A Skill-saw?

In a word, NO!

Not unless she wants to spend the rest of her life in prison or get the death penalty.

Adultery, no matter how humiliating to one's spouse, is not yet against the law. If it were left to the same Christian-right who helped elect Sanford, it would be a major crime and Sanford might be on his way to the gallows or the dungeon for the rest of his life.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see Sanford in prison or executed. I think that he will have suffered enough by the time this unholy mess is over-with. I'm just pointing out that the very people who elected him want to put the 10 commandments in every southern state capitol, if not codify the ten commandments and other selected parts of the Bible as American law. 

I would like to hear Governor Sanford speak to how stupid that would be in our Democratic Republic with a constitution that forbids an official religion.

 

Jenny Sanford's tough-minded response

Mary Schmich

June 26, 2009

It's safe to say that Jenny Sullivan Sanford, wife of South Carolina's governor, will not be appearing on "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!"

But overnight Jenny Sanford has turned into a celebrity, yet another woman forcibly inducted into the sorority of famously aggrieved political wives. She has to wish she could get out of that.

One poignancy of the Sanford story is that, like so many wives brazenly humiliated by the politicians they married, Sanford is as smart, maybe smarter, than her husband.

She grew up in Winnetka, the granddaughter of the founder of Chicago's Skil Corp., maker of power tools. When she and her husband met, she was a vice president at Lazard Freres, the investment firm. When he ran for Congress and then governor, she managed his campaigns.

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An heiress who shops at Wal-Mart (as the press likes to point out), she is known for her iron intelligence.

"It may be relatively easy to get 'one up' on the governor," a South Carolina blogger noted a while back, "but you don't mess with Jenny Sanford, people."

Mark Sanford has messed mightily with Jenny Sanford. After disappearing for several days, he resurfaced this week and confessed that he'd spent Father's Day in Argentina with another woman.

He claims to love that woman -- this was not just a sexual exploit! -- which may make his behavior less tawdry but is likely to make it even more hurtful to his wife.

So once again we, the public, step eagerly into our roles as marriage counselors.

Should Jenny Sanford join the long line of political wives who stand by their man?

Or should she have at him with a Skill-saw?

She didn't stand next to him when he stood up at a press conference Wednesday. Instead she issued a statement saying she still loved him and was open to reconciliation but had asked him two weeks ago for a trial separation.

"We reached a point," she said, "where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect, and my basic sense of right and wrong."

Sanford's response struck me as sensible, subtle and strong. She stood up for herself and corrected him without lashing out.

Tina Brown, publisher of The Daily Beast, a Web site, however, declared that the first lady of South Carolina "blew it."
 
(Ain't none of Tina's business, but whatever!)

Instead of "a pious manifesto that lets the governor off the hook," Brown wrote, Sanford should have "set the table for a big-ticket matrimonial lawyer to have a payday on behalf of all the humiliated political wives -- ashen Mrs. Eliot Spitzer; pulverized Dina Matos McGreevey; quietly imploding Mrs. Larry Craig; fuming deity Elizabeth Edwards."

But it's not Jenny Sanford's job to do anything on behalf of those other wives, or on behalf of a public that's affronted by sexually wayward politicos. Her job is to care for herself and her family.


AMEN!!!

And, really, a lot of the public outrage at the politicians isn't about the politicians. It's about us, our own experience of love or betrayal, our own fears for our relationships or the fate of women. When we proclaim what Jenny Sanford should do, we're really pondering what we, in that situation, might do.



Mostly, what it is all about for me and my friends is hypocrisy in the extreme! I have actually read the gospels and I seem to remember that Jesus of Nazareth was much more concerned with hypocrisy than adultery.

But no two relationships are precisely the same. Walking out isn't the only good answer to the insult of infidelity. As Hillary Clinton has shown, it may not even be the best revenge.

Revenge is a damned poor reason to do anything; stay, go, implode, explode, run for political office or invade and occupy another nation. 

Revenge is a form of mental illness or it is a crime. Most of us know that today in a way that we did not 100 years ago or less.

mschmich@tribune.com


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