Posted by Phil Shelley on May 20, 1999 at 10:48:42:
Dear Wheels, You are right about Paul Johnson. Except that the name of the women writer he was having an affair with was Gloria Stewart, not Swain. Miss, or Mrs Stewart also told the reporter that Johnson was a sado-masochist, a pervert who required her, for his own ual satisfaction, to his bottom while calling him "a boy."
Johnson himself said, in "Intellectuals" and more recently in a panel conducted by "Time Magazine", that if a man's private life is disfigured by adultery, or perversion, then the man's thought is poisoned; he should not be seen as a source of guidance or enlightenment.
Precisely. It is extraordinary that Mr Johnson, knowing the cirstances of his own life as he wrote those words, had the hide to say such a thing. But that is why conservatives should abandon Johnson and his moral double talk.
Suppose President Clinton has written a self-righteous book on morality, full of hypocritical condemnation of adultery and ual perversion in others. Would conservatives promote it? I think not, and for good reason. Exactly the same principle should apply to Johnson.
The book "Intellectuals" isn't just an attack on the moral lives of others, it is a moral claim on Johnson's behalf. That is why the book is a lie.
It is obvious from pieces in the left rag "Salon" magazine and elsewhere that Johnson's fall has delighted left-wingers. That's a strategic reason why Johnson is more help to our opponents than to ourselves. But the reason to repudiate Johnson is not strategic but moral.
Mr Johnson should be "outed". He should be exposed for what he is. And he should be "out" of the moral majority on which he has deceitfully imposed.