“Again, I didn’t cross the sex line. I went past the line… I’m quite certain that there were a handful of instances wherein I crossed lines I shouldn’t have crossed as a married man but never crossed the ultimate line.”

The above quote is from Gov. Mark Sanford, speaking candidly about his extramarital affair. But, in the style of most Americans, not quite candidly enough. So, what, they went to dinner and a movie? Cuddled on the couch? In his own words, Sanford described the tryst as, “a whole lot more than a simple affair… it’s a love story.” Did they dance by moonlight and look knowingly into each other’s eyes, kissing for only the briefest of moments before turning away. Were they, like Francesca and Paolo, seduced by reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, damning themselves forever to the second ring of Dante’s Hell? Inquiring minds, people!

The new angle, of course, is that Gov. Sanford may have been unfaithful, but he didn’t really cheat. Much like when Former Pres. Clinton claimed that oral sex wasn’t really “sex,” there seems to be some crucial barrier in the American psyche between intercourse, and every other possible thing. I refuse to allow my general distaste for Sanford to cloud my belief that a politician’s personal life is none of my business. I will criticize him for abandoning his post and coercing his assistants to lie for him, but I know just as well as everyone else that one can truly believe in family values and good Christian ethics and still screw up in a massive and very public way. My biggest worry is that these figure heads of abstinence-only education are really kind of missing the point.

Abstinence, as it was taught in my Catholic school by Sister Mary Trisha, does not mean just abstaining from penetrating heterosexual intercourse. It means choosing to avoid all temptations, even kissing with an open mouth. Everything that gave you any kind of erotic pleasure was sex, and experiencing that feeling with anyone other than your spouse (even if you were alone) was a sin. The only birth control we needed was a buttoned up sweater, as nothing should be progressing so far as to require crossing our legs. There was no fuzzy line at Our Lady of Mercy, where holding hands in the hallway could get you detention.

What is the great difference between flying halfway around the globe to meet a woman for coffee, a woman you admit to having great feelings for and whom your wife has expressly told you not to visit, and going to have sex with the same woman? Is one a greater betrayal than the other? Say you did go there to have sex, you were both naked, but it never progressed to intercourse. Does that make any real difference? For Sanford, the “ultimate line” is her bikini line, not the ticket line at the airport. A study from The Kinsey Institute, “based on a 1991 survey of 599 college students, found that women in general were less likely than men to consider oral sex or mutual masturbation as having ‘had sex.’ Of the women, 37 percent considered oral sex as, well, sex. Forty-four percent of men did. A second survey in 1996 asked ‘Is oral sex “real” sex?’ About 52 percent of the men said yes, but only 46 percent of women did.” (AP) There has got to be some connection between this cult of virginity (hey, if oral sex isn’t sex you can blow every guy in the state and still be pure) and the rise of a mutant strain of drug resistant gonorrhea (for real). It is, really and truly, none of my business what Gov. Sanford did or did not do in Argentina, but since he chose to volunteer this information to us, I’ve just got to say I’m disappointed. He may have done everything else buy have sex with this woman, but for all the trouble it’s caused him, he might as well have.

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