Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) is dropping his reelection bid amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into his behavior that includes hitting on his young female staffers, asking them out on dates, and excessively expressing his too-warm feelings for them.
Read the NPR coverage of Edwards’s behavior, and you’ll get many of the cringey details, absent a really important one: Edwards is married and has been for more than 45 years.
Recommended Stories
It’s bad that a boss, holding a position of public trust, made his employees feel uncomfortable with all sorts of inappropriate borderline-romantic attention. But it’s 10 times worse that this was a married man basically trying to go on dates with young women.
These accusations are, in effect, accusations of impropriety. The people of western North Carolina would surely want to know that their congressman is accused by two staffers of infidelity, because marital infidelity reflects on moral character, which is part of one’s fitness for office.
But NPR never mentions his marital status in its only piece on the matter, and this is the norm for the major news media to totally leave that out.
NBC quotes from the Ethics Committee report’s list of some of his alleged behavior: “providing the young women with lavish and recurrent gifts, making comments regarding their appearance and dress, inviting them to intimate dinners and vacations, sending notes regarding his effusive affection, and inviting them to other activities as a way to spend time together.”
Obviously, anyone would be made uncomfortable by a boss doing this. NBC notes that Edwards is 65, which makes it more embarrassing for him and unpleasant, but it also makes it worse for a young woman when the old guy hitting on you is married, yet that goes unmentioned by NBC. Likewise, the Associated Press never mentioned his marital status.
I wrote about this phenomenon recently regarding former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and NFL coach Mike Vrabel. I noticed the trend years ago, when I stated some specific reasons the marital status matters, two of which are relevant in the Edwards case:
DOES IT MATTER THAT ERIC SWALWELL IS MARRIED?
First, there’s a second victim here: the wife. Second, old married guys are supposed to be safe.
Our news media are wedded to a particularly weird, atomized worldview that diminishes marriage and all familial relationships and treats all vice and sin as human resources violations. The ignoring of marriage is one result.
