Although Paul Stanley, having finally responded to mounting pressure
that he resign, was slated to cease being the state senator for
District 31 on Monday, August 10th, his shadow still hangs over the
Tennessee General Assembly, in general,
and — some would say — over the moralistic wing of the
Republican Party, in particular.
Stanley’s resignation letter to Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey last week
was as formally bare bones as his subsequent letter to his constituents
in Germantown, Cordova, and East Memphis was inflected with sentiment.
In the latter, Stanley said most of the things that needed to be said,
among them this: “I humbly ask your forgiveness for my indiscretion.
The public criticism I have received thus far is well deserved. Even
before these matters became public, I have been concentrating my
efforts on rebuilding and repairing the damage I have done to my wife
and two great children. They (and not me) are the victims in this
situation, and I am to blame. I recognize that it is my actions that
have brought this embarrassment on my family.”
All well and good. And, after promising to “make amends” and asking
his constituents “to respect my wife and children’s privacy” to spare
them “the humiliation or embarrassment for my wrong doing and
indiscretion,” Stanley went on to say, “Admitting failure is difficult
but necessary if one expects to ever better themselves by allowing God
to work His will in their life.”
We do not propose to be cynical about this situation, nor judgmental
about further revelations concerning Stanley, which even now are
proliferating in the Nashville media and depict him as not merely
guilty of misconduct with his legislative intern and of taking the
explicit photographs that led to his being blackmailed. It would almost
seem from the reports now surfacing that the bashful-seeming Stanley
had been determined while serving in Nashville to transform himself
from Ichabod Crane to Brahm Bones, the manly stud who was that poor
schoolteacher’s persecutor. As he ascended in power, becoming chairman
of the Senate Commerce Committee, Stanley yielded more and more to
temptation — and to a measure of hypocrisy that may, to give the
stricken legislator his due, have been less premeditated than
unconscious.
Yet the hypocrisy was there. Stanley was evidently lecturing a
representative of Planned Parenthood on the virtue of abstinence and
the sanctity of marriage on the very eve, last April, of his
confrontation with the blackmailer who is charged with demanding
$10,000 as the price of allowing Stanley to keep his indiscretions
secret.
We hope that Paul Stanley’s moral redemption continues apace, but we
would suggest that his redemption — and that of the enablers
among his legislative mates — should extend not merely to the
realm of personal conduct and to the concerns of family but to the
secular issues that legislators must concern themselves with. As long
as a repentant Stanley chooses to invoke the Deity, let us remind his
legislative colleagues of that line of Scripture that commands concern
for “the least among these, my brethren.”
The breach of that principle has, after all, been the true sin of
the increasingly hard-edged, self-serving General Assembly in recent
years.
