Two possible Republican presidential candidates had those dreams dashed because of sex. At a time when the United States (US) Republican party is in a crisis of leadership, Governor Mark Sanford and Senator John Ensign could not keep their pants up long enough to make it to the next presidential race.

Democratic Senator John Edwards nearly made it on the presidential ticket before he was caught chasing in the hallway of a hotel where he had gone to meet his lover - an affair about which he reluctantly confessed, to the chagrin of his cancer-stricken wife.

Republican Representative Mark Foley resigned in disgrace after trying to solicit sex from underage male congressional interns. The number of prominent men who have fallen to various sexual deviancy, kinkiness and improper sexual relationships is staggering. I checked one list on the Internet and came up with 28 pages of just recent cases.

Why does sex rule our lives - often with our euphoric consent? It not only rules our lives, many times it literally ruins our lives. Like the recent case of 36-year-old Steve McNair, celebrity NFL quarterback, married with four kids. But he was found dead with his 20-year-old love, who blew his brains out before killing herself. The man was reportedly so obsessed with her that he promised to leave his wife (like so many other lying married men) and ended up united with her in death.

Sexual peccadilloes

America is a strange place in terms of cultural ethos. Americans are very open, even libertine, about sex which is everywhere, but in public life, sexual peccadilloes are not tolerated. The things which Jamaican politicians and celebrities get away with would cost careers in the United States. Our stars in politics, business, music and media openly have affairs and lead sordid sexual lives to the knowledge of everyone, and while it might make the gossip rounds, no one is losing status over it. Not so in the US.

Our politicians, business and media people turn up at exotic clubs and patronise the ladies but go back to their jobs in the morning. Prominent businessmen sexually harass staff and have open sexual liaisons with senior members of their management team, but no Jamaican firm is likely to do a darn thing about it. It's only a little sex after all, the thinking is. I mean, if it were corruption or even mismanagement, that would be worthy of some sanction, but why penalise men for being men - especially when power is added to gender? That's the kind of thinking in Jamaica, and not even the feminists among us have dared challenge this culture. I guess nobody wants to be thought of as being prudish.

Perhaps we should have more North American firms operating here, so they can apply North American standards of ethical behaviour to the workplace. Why don't we adopt that from North America? You can't get many Jamaicans to take on this matter of sexual harassment. To us, it's just no big deal.

Surprisingly preachy

The Sunday Gleaner on its front page last week published some statistics about births to mothers in wedlock versus those out of wedlock. It did not even provoke one electronic media discussion in a news week that was not spectacular. In 2007, births to unwed mothers shot up to nearly 36,000, while births to wedded mothers was a meagre 6,643. But these are non-issues here. Let's talk about the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the economy, Jamaica Labour Party-People's National Party, crime, educational under-achievement. (It never occurs to many that there might be a connection between those statistics and those 'really important' issues mentioned).

Time magazine last week (July 13) carried a cover story titled 'Unfaithfully Yours' with the sub-title 'Infidelity is eroding our most sacred institution. How to make marriage matter again'. In the piece itself, titled 'Why Marriage Matters' - a surprisingly preachy essay carried in the world's leading news magazine - the author mourns: "Adultery is not about sex or romance. It is about how little we mean to each other." But such expressions seem anachronistic, a cultural throwback, in our enlightened, permissive age of sexual liberation.

I keep saying that a study of philosophy is critically important. For we seem not to realise that the horse has long bolted, though we are scurrying to shut the gate.

If we really have no sure, absolute philosophical foundation; if we can't ground sexual ethics in transcendental, religious or trans-historical values, then how do we determine the truth of that statement? If we can't trust the Bible on history or take it seriously in what it reports, and if we can't be certain that its dicta forbidding sex before marriage, sex between members of the same sex and sex outside of marriage; if we can't objectively establish any infallible source of moral authority, how do we know that having sex with someone other than our spouses constitutes 'cheating'?

Why is it cheating? Isn't the whole notion of cheating in relation to what is legitimate? Isn't it just a matter of socialisation? (such as taking too literally our marriage vows about 'forsaking all others'). Suppose our vows were to be taken just like poetry - beautiful, enchanting but not to be vulgarised by literalism? If a man is doing a good job as a senator or a governor or a congressman, or a JLP or PNP politician, why should it matter that he is sleeping with two persons apart from his wife? Why should it matter that a congressman is discovered to be addicted to pornography as long as he is not trading in it?

Uncomfortable questions, but we are treading the treacherous waters of values. Remember, we are living in a time when we are questioning everything and every single source of authority. There was a time when 'respectable' people in Jamaican society did not live in concubinage. Concubinage was for lower-class people, poor people who could not do better.

Shack up

But today many high-society people shack up and are proudly featured on the society pages with their 'lady love' and live-in beau. Disgrace removed; concubinage democratised - or elitised. So why not homosexuality? Why not turn up with your homosexual lover and be celebrated on the society pages?

Now people start rushing for Bible and using words like 'unnatural' and 'immoral'. Says who? If we have no sure ethical foundations; if we in Jamaica and the West, which have been influenced by the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, have cherry-picked things as OK - sex before marriage, living together without marriage, having children outside of marriage - then why not homosexuality? Some would ask why put homosexuality in that category - why bring in such 'dirty stuff' with our now culturally accepted practices (formerly labelled as sins)?

Because the basis of calling something immoral or unethical is what we are debating and what we are asking is how we do really know? How do we get back the genie in the bottle?

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who did a marvellous job hounding Wall Street before its greed and corruption were revealed during the meltdown, had to resign in disgrace because of his fondness for prostitutes. You could ask why should a man who is doing a great job have to leave because he consorted with prostitutes. Because prostitution is against the law? But why should it be against the law? If a man can use his hands for hire; if a woman can use her brains to do accounting, medicine, and Usain Bolt can use his feet for pay; Mike Tyson his hands for pay; and newscasters can use their voices for hire, why can't a woman use her sexual organs for hire? I am asking uncomfortable questions because I want to force an unusual activity - thinking.

Private choices

How do we know what we know, and how has society come to make up all these elaborate rules about right and wrong to govern our private choices? And we keep changing these rules - now it is acceptable to have children out of wedlock irrespective of class; it is all right to live together without marriage and to have a mistress - then why can't we change the rules about prostitution, abortion and homosexuality? What's inherently immoral about them? (Abortion is murder and homosexuality is against nature, some would retort). But scientists will tell you that there is homosexuality in nature so you can't use that argument (see, for example, the article 'Bisexual Species' in the latest issue of Scientific American Mind, a special issue on sex).

In her Time magazine essay, Caitlin Flanagan says essentially the underlying issue is commitment and the discipline to live that commitment. Mark Sanford felt irresistibly pulled to his Argentinean mistress, to the point that he had to go missing from South Carolina for days just to be with her. He had grown out of love with his wife and his soul clung to his mistress. Flanagan rightly notes that marriage is today largely a "fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness".

It's the same problem identified brilliantly by philosopher F.L. Jackson in his engaging essay in the philosophical journal Animus (Vol. 6, 2001): "The freedom of the individual is modernity's absolute. Ethically, radical individual freedom yields the principle that one has an absolute right to choose, indifferent to whether what is actually chosen can be judged good or evil. This principle is devastating when applied to social and ethical institutions (like marriage)."

Jackson has touched the nerve of our problem with sex: Outside of a firm moral compass, and possessed of only utilitarian principles to guide us, a Sanford, Ensign, Edwards, Foley and McNair will go for what feels titillating, what satisfies the senses, irrespective of their obligations and vows.

It's the age of the supremacy of desire.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.