Sanford and Sons Scandal

Henry Makow
June 27, 2009

Why can’t we find a grown man who will put responsibility to country, wife and family above the allure of sex? This widespread arrested development is caused by the secular religion of sex which mistakes romance for real love and spiritual fulfillment.

Gov. Mark Sanford, 49, a Christian Conservative, didn’t spend Father’s Day with his four sons. He flew off to Buenos Aires to be with his mistress Maria, 43, starting a two-week trial separation from his wife of 20 years, Jenny, 47.

Sanford’s wife Jenny is an attractive, educated woman who served as his campaign manager. She is the mother of his four sons. The novelty goes out of any relationship. It is replaced by devotion to the people who love you, to your progeny (your organic growth) and to making a better world for them to inhabit.

By “listening to his heart” Sanford betrayed both his family and his nation. Like Eliot Spitzer, he was considered a front-runner for the GOP Presidential nomination in 2012. Like Spitzer, Mark Sanford has damaged his career at a time when America is sorely in need of honest, competent leadership.

Sanford’s personal emails to Maria from July 2008 were hacked by another of her suitors. They reveal that even at the pinnacle of his career, Sanford was seeking spiritual fulfillment in romance instead of service.

He complains that he has been dominated by his head for too long. “You have my heart,” he says. Love “has become a real need of mine. You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty…Above all else I love that inner beauty about you.”

Sanford is idealizing this woman, easy to do when you have limited contact.(She is a divorcee who recommends Alan Greenspan’s last book, and is looking for a therapist.) By loving her, Sanford thinks he can possess her spiritual qualities and sophistication. He can’t. He must cultivate these qualities in himself.

He seems to miss his mother’s love: “She had the ultimate of all gifts — and that was the ability to love unconditionally. The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become.”

He is a spiritual seeker. He talks about operating an earth excavator on his farm at sunrise:

Sanford and Sons - Original Story