It’s been rough sailing  for South Carolina Republicans. The state’s governor was caught in the middle of some extracurricular loving and then wouldn’t keep his trap quiet about it. Representative Joe Wilson was so drunk with Tea Bag spirits he forgot the Capitol Dome is not a frat house. And this week two South Carolina politicians penned an editorial that would have made Archie Bunker swell with pride.

Edwin O. Merwin and James S. Ulmer, South Carolina county Republican chairs, wrote in support of their senator,  Jim DeMint. So far so good. They were giving DeMint props for being leery of earmarks. Cool. Nothing wrong with supporting  someone who is budget conscious. However, the train ran off the rails when Merwin and Ulmer started their ode to DeMint thus:

“There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.”

So to show your DeMint love, you two decide to resort to an ugly stereotype? Really fellas?  You thought you were being helpful? If a staff member read it and didn’t tell you to take that paragraph out, please kick her out of your office now. She’s a plant.  DeMint ( is he the only Republican in the state who isn’t crazy?) called the editorial “thoughtless and hurtful” and someone informed Merwin and Ulmer it was best to apologize.

To all my Republican brothers and sisters: if you are writing something for public consumption and are not sure if its anti-Semitic, please feel free to send it to me. I’ll check it out and save you all the hassle.

Andrew Sullivan needs no support from me. And from what little I know about the man he would be dismissive of it. Sully has a habit of calling anyone who disagrees with him as either unthinking or a wannabe destroyer of American life (remember how ballistic he went when anyone questioned the Iraq War?). With that said, please pay attention to  an email sent to him yesterday.

Sullivan has been hammering away at the White House for its lack of action on DADT. Yes there are moments when his pen can go over the top (heck, even he will cop to that), but giving President Obama grief for not doing enough on DADT is honorable work. Even Obama admitted as much when he spoke to HRC Saturday night. Well according to an emailer, Sullivan’s stand on the matter is “embarrassing”  because the White House has more pressing issues.

This is a position worth discussing, but the emailer (called from here on in as smug straight person, SSP) isn’t concerned about conversation. Instead he just wants to say what a fag Sullivan is.

“Geez, you’re a princess. Gay people account for what? 9% of the population? That much? Heterosexual sex is the ability to replicate consciousness. All wonders of the universe are created by the union of sperm and egg. The sperm and the egg have created everything.”

Not the “straight coupling is so transcendent” line! I wonder does the emailer have this same thought when his wife goes down on him before she takes their kids to school? Or maybe when he’s begging to do her in the booty? Could be this thought passes his mind when he is lusting over some television tart. Nothing against straight sex but let’s be fair here: when they go at it, most heterosexuals are not looking to “replicate consciousness.”

While opposite sex atteraction is a union of the gods, gay love is…wait for it….”a cross” and SSP wants Sullivan to bear his silently and recognize how his gayness keeps him away from the higher love of his straight peers. I’m assuming that search for the ethereal  is why Gov. Mark Sanford went to Argentina so many times.

Oh, but SSP is not done. He has one more flourish.

“Go suck a dick, and suck it up, sweetheart.”

There it is. That straight conceit. The card too many heterosexuals play when they need to put us in our place for our uppity behavior. Take care of their churches, serve in the military, teach their children, clean their houses, show compassion to their sick and dying, pay taxes, entertain them, be their neighbors, but no sounds about rights or our relationships. Just suck dick. That’s all we are good for.

First there was Gov. Mark Sanford, his, love affair, and inability to shut his trap about it. There is the state’s lieutenant governor and his supposed gay gay ways. Then last night, as President Barack Obama was speaking to a joint session of Congress, Rep. Joe Wilson squawked “You lie!”.Wilson’s town-hall antic came when the president said his health insurance proposal would not cover illegal immigrants (I’ll let the good people at FactCheck.org deal with that). If we lived in Great Britain, Wilson’s outburst would be no biggie. The give and take between a prime minister and MPs are rather legendary; however, here in the US of A Wilson’s eruption is a break with decorum. The South Carolina representative issued a statement last night, offering his regrets.

“While I disagree with the president’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility.”

Wilson apparently even called White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Good for him.

The crazies of his party will turn Wilson into a hero who faced down the fascist/Muslim/socialist/nazi Obama with unvarnished truth. If Wilson has an ounce of honor he will reject any hosannas and say what he did was out of bounds. After he does that, he can then say why he and Obama don’t see eye to eye.

We on the left will be shocked (simply shocked sir!) at Wilson’s inability to act like an adult, but let’s not turn this into a cause. If we want to mock a Republican, let’s turn our ire toward fool Michael Duvall, who when caught sharing salacious details of an affair offered this as his initial excuse: he thought his conversation was “private.”

Why does a lt. governor matter? Because he will replace Gov. Mark Sanford if the governor resigns or is impeached (very possible, since the governor is currently dealing with a Latin American sex scandal of his own).

Bauer has no voting record for or against gay issues – but then again, few gay bills make it to South Carolina’s floor (the last one, on hate crimes, died in committee when Bauer was in the state senate).

In the comments section to his post, Rogers says:

“He has spoken about marriage, and in a letter endorsing Huckabee cited the protection of “traditional marriage” as one of the reasons to elect Huckabee.”

Here’s a story about outing and South Carolina’s gay closet issue in the Columbia Free Times.

1. When I’m out drinking, some men share their family dramas.

2. When I’m out drinking,  I wish some men would stop sharing their family dramas….unless they are cute.

3. RIP Frank McCourt.

4. You know marriage rights foes are losing the debate when they go bat-doo crazy over a small market paper printing a gay marriage announcement.

5. Anyone see the new Potter film?

6. Why didn’t I get to do the Stevie Nicks interview?

7. Does Governor Mark Sanford know when to keep his trap shut?

8. There is something priceless about a porn star going to jail for breaking into a beauty salon. Hopefully someone will turn that wackiness into a porn flick!

9. I  want to say something snarky about my day job, but in this economy it’s bad form to make the bosses upset. I love my job and everything about it. Everything.

10. Keep Army Private Bowe R. Bergdahl and his family in your thoughts.

It is patient and kind, he wrote. It is NOT jealous or boastful.

The Christian counselors Sanford sought out while trying to decide whether to stay with his wife or jump on a plane to South America advised him what else love is and isn’t.

“Their point is that love is not a feeling,” Sanford told The Associated Press in a tearful two-day confessional. “It’s a choice. It’s an action.”

That sentiment might seem cold to many Americans, but it is perfectly consistent with the born-again, evangelical Christian world that Sanford inhabits, says sociologist John Bartowski.

“What evangelicals are doing is sort of carving out a subcultural view of love which is not so highly romanticized as we see in movies, that is at odds with the dominant view of love,” says Bartowski, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author of the book, “Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families.”

That world view, he says, “divorces” love from emotion, because “feelings are fleeting and not to be trusted.”

“Love is something that is cultivated in the trenches of living a day-to-day relationship,” says Bartowski. “That is not a Hallmark moment.”

So while there are countless romantics out there urging Sanford to follow his heart, he can expect mostly tough love from his own spiritual community.

“The emotions are the icing on the cake,” says Ben Witherington, a New Testament professor at Kentucky’s Asbury Theological Seminary. “They’re not the cake.”

Witherington says feelings are a “notoriously unreliable guide” in personal relationships because they tend to change with time. Marriage is not just a commitment of will, he says, but a commitment before God.

“That’s why, at a Christian wedding service, you don’t say, ‘I feel like’ and ‘I feel like.’ You say, ‘I will’ and ‘I will,’ ‘I do’ and ‘I do.’”

Sanford is a man writhing in agony as his emotions battle his sense of duty – to his wife, to their four sons, to his office.

In one e-mail to his lover, Maria Belen Chapur, Sanford said to “sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul.”

He told the AP on Tuesday that the past 8 1/2 years have been an emotional “wrestling match,” a struggle “between one’s heart and one’s value system.”

“A whole lot more than a simple affair,” he said. “It’s a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”

That is not how he talks of his bond with Jenny Sanford.

“I do have a love for my wife,” he told AP. “I do have a love for my boys. I do have a love for the farm. I do have a love for the world of ideas and politics.”

What has also become clear over the past few days is that Sanford has decided – at least for now – to take his friends’ advice and try to repair his marriage. The friend whose words appear to echo loudest is Warren “Cubby” Culbertson.

The owner of a court reporting business, Culbertson, 51, is an influential Bible study leader and considered a pillar of the state capital’s Christian community. Sanford told him about the affair immediately after his wife discovered it in January, and Culbertson has been counseling the couple ever since – even holding a monthlong spiritual “boot camp” at the governor’s mansion.

Culbertson told the AP he believes that “everybody’s vulnerable, and there are no boundaries on darkness.” He does not dine alone with other women and keeps his office door open when he has a female visitor.

He says he has counseled many men “who have fallen in the position that Mark’s in.”

“Everybody starts with the same exact story: ‘We got to be friends. We started talking. I didn’t mean for anything to happen,’” he says. “That’s exactly where a sin begins.”

Many times during the past week, Sanford has quoted Culbertson and others almost verbatim in describing where things went astray.

“It was innocent,” he said of his first meeting on a beachside Uruguayan dance floor with Chapur. “That was the beginning of sin right there. … If you’re a married guy, at the end of the day, you shouldn’t be dancing with somebody else.”

Culbertson has advised Sanford to stay with his wife. If Sanford works diligently, he believes the couple can find an even “greater love” than they once had.

The Rev. Gary Chapman agrees.

A senior associate pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., Chapman has been a marriage counselor for 35 years. He has written several books, most notably “The Five Love Languages.”

Chapman says Sanford is in the throes of what he calls the “in-love experience.”

“It’s not that there is not emotion involved in love,” he says. “But the ‘in-love’ experience is super emotion. It’s very euphoric. It doesn’t take any effort. You’re just pushed along by your emotions.”

That high doesn’t last, Chapman warns. Rather than seek that high over and over, he counsels couples to stick with the commitment they’ve already made and learn how to “keep love alive.”

A faded love can be reborn, he says. But it takes time – and work.

“You don’t sit around waiting for the emotional love to come back.”

I know how the game is supposed to play. Show some moral outrage. Be shocked and appalled that Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican who had no problem voting against gay adoption when he was a U.S. senator congressman and was unequivocal in his opposition to gay marriage, got caught in some marital scandal. If I were a teenager still in the afterglow of a “Catcher in the Rye” high (I loathe that book), then indignation at hypocrisy would be called for. However, I haven’t seen my teenage years since Brothers Johnson ruled the radio.

The Sanford scandal is boring. Sure some of the details are rather juicy (seems to me he could have planned his Argentina trip with a smidgen more subterfuge), but infidelity is as common as dirt. As for the pretense, like Big Daddy noted that’s part of the human condition and I really can’t get bent out of shape when there is a glaring distinction between what a pol espouses and how she actually lives her life. That is not newsworthy, yet we as voters clutch the pearls when a politician admits some hot mess most of us have engaged in. No need to worry. I’m not sharing your secrets. And if you have been faithful to your lovah please don’t announce how you are a better spouse than Sanford.

This episode didn’t change my opinion about Sanford and I’m sure those getting the most pleasure out of his fall never gave him a dime or a vote. I would rather spend time critiquing his anti-adoption stance instead of getting some perverse pleasure out of failings that we all share.