Of course she is. You thought that only Gary Condit’s privacy was going to appease the press-wolves? According to Josh Marshall in Salon, Lisa DePaulo, a talented muck-raker, is working on a story for Talk magazine, Tina Brown’s latest (and awful) vehicle. Now Levy’s sex life will be fodder – and if she had an active one, look out for the Kudlows to trash her as well. Better still for the press: If she’s dead, she can’t sue!
THE HIDDEN LAW: Excellent piece, as usual, by Jonah Goldberg – even though he calls me “daffy” – in National Review Online. The critical issue for Jonah seems to be that violation of privacy is legit in matters of adulterous affairs, if the news happens to come out incidentally and inexorably in the course of some other run of events – e.g. your lover goes missing, your girlfriend gets pregnant and has a baby, your S&M game goes wrong and someone gets a black eye or something worse. Once that has happened, and the intern is out of the bag, or sling, or whatever, it is the duty of one and all to condemn the offender in order to uphold social mores. Okay, Jonah. I’m with you so far (except I seem to recall a Gospel passage about casting the first stone, and so on, but never mind). I can almost see why, in the Condit case, the revelation of his adultery with Chandra Levy is not an invasion of privacy per se, because it is pertinent to her whereabouts (although quite how, exactly, I’m not so sure). So I’m not a privacy absolutist, as Jonah says. What concerns me is how this revelation can then be leveraged by the press – in aid of social mores and, er, sales – to go on a fishing expedition about everything else in Condit’s life. This is the same evil as that perpetrated by sexual harassment law. If a single case of such behavior is alleged in court, then every other possible detail of someone’s private life is fair game for legal and media discovery. We soon launch something close to an inquisition into the most intimate matters. This is not merely unseemly. It is dangerous. Even sleazeballs deserve a zone of privacy. And without some kind of durable public-private distinction, even for cads, liberal democracy becomes increasingly untenable.
STEM CELLS: I’ve just finished a first draft of my TRB this week on stem cell human embryo research. Thanks for all your input. I realize, having thought pretty hard about this, that I have few doubts that all such research is morally unconscionable. Don’t write me though until you’ve read the piece. Please. But one point I couldn’t cram into the 1200 words I’m allowed is the following. I believe as a matter of simple logic – not merely religious faith – that the only non-arbitrary moment at which a human being becomes a human being is at the moment of conception. That’s why I cannot ultimately support experimenting on such human beings. But how then do I justify my middle-of-the-road stance on abortion, which is to keep it legal in the first trimester? The answer, I guess, is my political and moral respect for a woman’s dominion over her own body. A woman’s right to determine her own body’s fate is a bulwark of her freedom from coercive state power – and that freedom seems to me only outweighed by the obvious humanity of an unborn child after the first trimester. I know that’s an arbitrary stage of fetal development as well. But it’s as good as any basis I can think of for a compromise. I know this isn’t a perfect solution, but using the power of government to control a woman’s body in the early stages of pregnancy when good people sincerely differ about the moral status of a fetus is anathema to me. But in the stem cell issue, that question never really arises. These embryos are in no-one’s body. Their right to exist doesn’t have to be balanced by the countervailing right of the mother to be left alone. That’s why I think we’re right to be tougher on abusing extremely young humans in the laboratory than in the womb. At least that’s where my thinking is at right now.
The Dish 