For a few weeks now, Nashville mayor Megan Barry has been embroiled in quite the sex scandal. It seems Barry has been engaged in an affair with the police sergeant who was the head of her security detail. (Both are married.) For an added layer of unseemliness, Barry seems to have taken a lot of taxpayer-funded trips that included just her and her security chief.
The Barry scandal hadn’t received much coverage outside of Tennessee. (If you surmise this means she’s not a Republican, you surmise right.) That is, until the New York Times published a remarkable op-ed defending her, “Nashville’s Mayor Has Stumbled. Who Will Cast the First Stone?”
Well, we’re happy to aim a few pebbles towards the op-ed, which is a stunning work of rationalization. “The language of full emotional availability is [Barry’s] native tongue. Perhaps that’s why this city loves her. She hugs schoolchildren,” Times contributor Margaret Renkl wrote. “She looks genuinely joyful at city parades and festivals.” Oh, and did we mention her politics are really liberal? That’s another reason we shouldn’t get carried away.
The Scrapbook is trying to imagine how Times editors and readers would react if this were a sexual and political role reversal: “Well, sure Donald Trump’s lawyer paid off a porn star in a way that may or may not have run afoul of election laws, but let’s not get bogged down in details when the stock market is way up as a result of his leadership. He’s making America great again!”
Finally, there is an unusually overdone appeal to our common humanity by the author, which begins to sound less like the usual New York Times fare and more like a Cosmo confessional: “Thirty-two years ago I, too, fell in love with a man I worked with. . . . I still remember the way the temperature in that tiny grad-school office changed when he walked in the door, the way the heat radiating from him charged every atom in my body with desire, the way I thought I would not survive another second if I couldn’t touch his skin,” she writes. “We all know this heat. It can reduce people to ashes. It can make us take incredibly stupid risks.”
Indeed, there are risks one shouldn’t take, and rushing to defend a philandering politician is certainly one of them.
