Is McCain a “world-class womanizer”?

AL writes:

It’s absurd for John McCain, who was a world class womanizer, to be the candidate of the anti-abortion voters. Men like McCain are the primary cause of abortion. You can’t decouple abortion from overall sexual morality.

LA replies:

Calling McCain a “world class womanizer” is not fair. According to all the accounts I’ve read, in 1973 McCain came back from his five and a half years of imprisonment and torture in North Vietnam, severely injured and permanently disabled, and found that his wife had been severely injured and disabled from a car accident, and much changed. Among other things, as a result of 23 operations, she was now five inches shorter. He lived with her, apparently without any infidelity, for about four years, then around 1977 began having adulterous affairs until he met his current wife in 1979 and commenced an affair with her. Then in 1980 he divorced his first wife and married his current wife. There have been no serious allegations of infidelity during the 28 years of his second marriage.

So McCain had adulterous affairs during a two- or three-year period of his life. I’m not defending that. We’ve never had a president who destroyed his first marriage through adultery, and whose relationship with his current wife began as an adulterous affair, and I certainly think that it’s a legitimate issue to be raised in the campaign (especially in light of the attention being paid to John Edwards’s adultery). But it’s not the same as being a “world-class womanizer.”

Greco writes:

Your point about labeling McCain a “world class womanizer” is well taken. In a world where Wilt Chamberlain and Gene Simmons have boasted of having thousands of sex partners, the bar for “world class” is set pretty high.

Greco writes:

I was hoping you would blog about the faith forum at Saddleback Church yesterday, because McCain’s stories of his POW period were compelling … more compelling coming from his own mouth than they’ve stuck me in writing. The irony is, there’s a group of Vietnam veterans out there who despise McCain. It has to do with the complicated politics of the POW recovery movement of the ’80s … or something. If you ever have time, visit Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain. It will boggle your mind, the viciousness of it.

Adela G. writes:

AL writes: “Men like McCain are the primary cause of abortion.”

No, unwanted pregnancy is the primary cause of abortion.

Philip M. writes:

Adela G. writes:

AL writes: “Men like McCain are the primary cause of abortion.”

No, unwanted pregnancy is the primary cause of abortion.

What is she saying? That we need to create a society in which no-one has an unwanted pregnancy? This will never happen,sex is too strong an instinct, and thank God that it is, because our demographic situation would be far worse if people only had ‘wanted pregnancies’.

I’m not even sure I would want to live in the kind of bloodless Scandanavian socieites in which every human life has to be planned by sensible people as if they are buying a house or making a will.

The primary cause of abortion is the fact that it’s legal, and just as many people now would not sacrifice their lives for their society because their life is more important to them, so they will not sacrifice their quality of life for the sake of another because that is also too important to them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2008 02:05 PM | Send