Dealing With Her Urges
By Jeffrey Page
With regard to Christine O’Donnell, the press has come up short in asking the hard questions.
Bill Maher says there is tape of O’Donnell, the holier-than-thou-and-everyone-else Tea Party candidate for the Senate from Delaware, saying she would never tell a lie. Never is too far in the future to let pass without elaboration.
What if Hitler rang the doorbell and O’Donnell had Anne Frank hiding upstairs. “No, I would not lie,” O’Donnell was quoted by Maher. “God would find a way.”
But of course in Anne Frank’s case, God did not find a way.
Still, couldn’t some lady or gentleman of the fourth estate have asked O’Donnell how God would have protected Anne? Because when the Nazis finally came for her she was unceremoniously shipped off to Bergen-Belsen where she died. She was 15.
I don’t think it’s unfair to infer that someone who would refuse to lie in order to save a human life most likely would refuse to steal to save a life as well. Could O’Donnell identify even in the slightest with Jean Valjean who stole bread in order to survive in “Les Misérables?” Or would she dismiss him as a common thief who deserves everything he gets from the merciless Javert? But no one asked such questions.
In another matter, no one put the words “I dabbled into witchcraft”—complete with that strange preposition – into Christine O’Donnell’s merciless mouth. The words came gushing out on their own in one of her many appearances on Maher’s television show “Politically Incorrect.” Granted, the witchcraft discussion was in 1999, and nowadays she reminds us that this dabbling occurred when she was in high school. Macbeth listened to some witches and you know what it got him.
“One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that,” O’Donnell said. “We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.” That would be the altar with the little bit of blood and stuff like that, right? Unless you have O’Donnell’s phone number, you won’t know whose blood it was, or how it got there because no one in the press has asked her about that.
She said all that fun on the satanic altar after the movie was one of her “first dates” with a witch. But no one asked her how many more such bloody dates she has had with witches, or when the last one was.
She did, however, ask a cheering crowd: “How many of you didn’t hang out with questionable folks in high school?” Actually I hung out with Judy Levine but, despite the fact she always dressed in black, I don’t think Judy was questionable. She wasn’t a witch; she was a beat generation writer. When we were reading “The Catcher in the Rye” and thinking ourselves pretty cool for doing so, Judy was reading “On the Road.”
Now, masturbation is to be avoided, according to the story of Onan and Judah in Genesis 38:3-10. And I know that everybody has violated the word at one time or other – maybe many more times or other. O’Donnell has said that masturbation is a form of adultery.
“It’s not enough to be abstinent with other people; you also have to be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery so you can’t masturbate without lust,” O’Donnell said, and I’m really not sure she knows what she’s talking about.
Isn’t anyone in the press going to ask O’Donnell if she ever had fun with herself under the covers late at night and, if she did, if she considers herself to have committed adultery with – who? Her right hand?
If masturbation is lust that must be avoided, surely extramarital sex is lust that must be avoided as well. I wish that some reporter had asked O’Donnell straight out what she does in those moments alone when a strong libidinous craving overtakes her poor defenseless self and there is no husband to relieve it. She is, after all, 41 years old and single.
Is she suggesting that she has spent the decades suppressing her sudden private needs?
Do you buy that? I don’t. But we won’t know much until someone asks her. And no one seems inclined to do that. Why do you suppose that is? One possibility: Publishers sell newspapers when they can put some certifiable character on Page 1, and publishers these days want to sell all the papers they can.
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.
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