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Update to prior CW topic, in another round of America's favorite game Everyone Has a Sex Scandal Eventually: Vice reports that Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation
From Vice's reporting:
OUR states only that:
The Mormon church meanwhile chips in to scold Ballard as well:
Prior thread on Ballard's film here; My own prior comment here
My read on all this is that it is a human psychological tragedy, Ballard got lost in his own masculine heroic fantasy. Good men nearly all carry the fantasy of, as they say, wishin' a nigga would. We want a reason to give our World of Cardboard Speech. We have the urge to engage in violence and adventure, but we want justified violence, righteous adventure. We want to fight, but fight for the right. Ballard found it in child trafficking investigations. He got to play James Bond in real life!
And what does James Bond do? He sleeps with every woman he sees, "as part of the mission." One can see the logic, if these OUR operatives were in an undercover role pretending to be a couple, that making love would be important. Blowing their cover could cost their lives, could endanger the children they are there to rescue, so whether they want to is irrelevant, they have to! But that was also part of the fantasy for him: he wanted to have to, he wanted an environment where he just had to sleep with these women, which he would then enjoy. No doubt, in his mind, the women involved shared the same fantasy. After all, while else would they join OUR and put themselves in these operations?
Ballard never meant any harm to anyone, he never meant to take advantage, he just thought he had found a moral loophole, an opportunity to enter a morals-free zone for a good cause. Apparently the women involved, the rest of the organization, and the Mormon church disagreed.
We should be wary of our fantasies of righteousness, as men. Engage in self-criticism, when we want to have a reason to use righteous violence, sometimes we just want violence. Which itself isn't necessarily a fatal flaw, there is value in harnessing masculine urges in positive ways, that can be seen as the basis for all social function. But we can't let our fantasies obscure our real mission, or harm those around us.
I had to look this guy up to find out that he’s married. For some reason the articles about the scandal don’t seem to think that’s relevant. Really shows how these low-level journalists think. His wife won’t give quotes to the media, or file publicly-available court documents, and of course, it would be unethical to speculate on how she feels about her husband trying to sleep with his coworkers, so the biggest victim is left unadvocated for. In Vice News’s America, the worst sin one can commit against a woman is triggering the almighty ick.
Why is the emotional harm to his wife privileged over the emotional harm to his employees?
In Mormonism (and, to a slightly lesser extent, orthodox Christianity) because one is a violation of a promise wrapped up in a sacrament, and the other is common-or-garden boorishness. It is similar to how lying about office sex having sworn an oath to tell you the truth, and called divine judgement down on yourself if you forswear is worse than casually lying about bombing an aspirin factory. Except more so, because judicial oaths simply invoke the name of god while touching a holy book, whereas sacraments are basically real-world cleric spells.
What I find more interesting is the total inversion of the principle in secular (and secularised nominally-Christian) culture. The thing that crystallised this for me was the Ryan Giggs superinjunction affair - both sides of the debate agreed that the interests being balanced were Ryan Giggs' right to conceal his affair from his wife and children vs. Imogen Thomas's right as a vulnerable victim to tell her own story (and get paid for it). But it goes back further - even Christian conservatives talked about the Clinton sex scandals as if Monica was more of a victim than Hilary. (For the avoidance of doubt, under the traditional Christian conservative standard the "other woman" was also contemptible - terms like "homewrecker" were not compliments).
Matthew Parris wrote a book of famous British political scandals in the early noughties, and one of the points he made in the closing essay is that since the 1980's it has been easier for politicians to survive a sex scandal if they divorce their wife and marry their mistress than if they dump the mistress and return to their wife. This is also consistent with the "the other woman is the real victim" frame.
Modern secular culture no longer believes that we owe our spouses fidelity. It does believe that men owe the women they are fucking (regardless of the official nature of the relationship) some kind of fair dealing which is incompatbile with carrying on with a mistress while planning to return to your wife.
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There is innately a hierarchy of moral obligation, as expressed by your son being worth more to you than a generic person on the moon.
.. to you, yes.
I'm not sure why we as outside observers would share that moral hierarchy.
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Family is holier than business. Clearly.
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Umm... why shouldn't it?
Yes, that's a serious question.
From where I am standing if we're to be ranking sins in order of severity, "violating a sacred vow" or "cheating in a relationship" strike me as far far worse than "hooking up with a coworker".
One of these things is lurid enough to make the news, while the other is a normal Tuesday.
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That's not privileging harm to anyone, that's privileging his vows.
Which is a fine thing for you morality to be based on, it's just different from OP's point, which was centering the wife as 'the biggest victim'.
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The closer you are to someone the more they can hurt you. Better to lose a job than a spouse, better to be mistreated by a boss than a spouse. I'd rather be sexually harassed than have my spouse sexually harass someone.
Strong disagree honestly, you take vows that typically include 'for better or for worse' when you get married, any harm suffered from your spouse is still morally bad but you sort of knowingly signed up for that gamble and did a lot of paperwork about it.
Whereas 'My boss will fly me to a remote and dangerous part of a foreign country, insist that we have to sleep in the same hotel bed, then try to fuck me' should not be an assumed risk people are taking when they sign up for a job where that isn't explicitly specified in the contract. That's too high a burden to place on the employment relationship, especially because people have to wok to live and can't realistically decide not to take that gamble.
I mean this sort of thing both should not be, and is, an assumed risk in any relationship, mainly because abuse is bad. Talking about "risks" at all muddies the water, since there will always be a risk of something bad happening, and there's virtually nothing we can do about that no matter how draconian our laws.
People can (and should) more easily switch jobs than spouses, so again I have to disagree here. People are (and should be) much more psychologically harmed by switching spouses than jobs too.
This is just such a strange perspective. I don't like the phrase "victim-blaming" but it really feels like you're putting the moral responsibility on the victim here. I think the closer the relationship the more responsible you are for not mistreating your partner. Sure, in closer relationships you should try much harder to forgive the perpetrator before giving up the relationship, but that's not really relevant to how bad the perpetrator's actions are.
We have obligations towards our children which we don't have towards strangers. It is a moral obligation for the former relationship to be better than the latter. Therefore, should our treatment of our children be equal to our treatment of strangers, we are neglecting our duty to our children, whatever that treatment is. If you don't feed a stranger, that's fine. If you don't feed your children, that's abuse. If you hate a stranger, who cares. If you hate your children, they will be deeply scarred psychologically.
The same goes for a spouse. You're more morally responsible for your spouse than your employees, so you bear more moral responsibility for mistreating the former than the latter.
Let me premise by saying my feelings about a spouse are not applicable to my feelings about children. Spousal relationships are at least in theory voluntary, being someone's child is not. And children are a special class anyway because they lack other rights and capabilities.
But, speaking only about spouses: I'm not sure how much we disagree vs. how much we're asking different questions.
I think there are two axes here, the perspective we're judging morality from, and the difference between harms vs obligations.
I would agree that, from the perspective of a husband, the husband has moral duties and obligations to his wife that he doesn't have towards other people.
I think you agree with this?
I also believe that, from the perspective of society, we should more harshly sanction a husband doing harm to a stranger than to his wife. The wife made a choice to be in that situation, and has legal recourse to leave it; strangers did not and do not, generally.
I think you don't agree with this, and call victim blaming? My feeling there is that, again from the perspective of society, 'blame' is not a useful construct and we should instead be thinking about systems of harm minimization. We want to minimize the amount that society or the state interferes with voluntary marriages, giving people a free escape hatch if they want out but otherwise letting the couple negotiate the nature of that relationship mostly for themselves. We want society and the state to interfere with the relationship between employers and employees, or random people with strangers, a lot more closely stringently than that.
I think usually it's harder for the wife to leave than for a stranger to leave, though. And theoretically the wife didn't choose to be in that situation either (though, knowing relationships in real life, it does seem that the red flags exist and are usually quite obvious long beforehand).
Emotional abuse--as a stranger, walk away. As a spouse, get a divorce. Way harder. Same with almost anything else, it really is harder for the spouse to leave than a stranger, or an employee. Maaaaybe it's harder for some employees to leave their jobs than for some spouses to leave the marriage, but this is a very rare case and I think can generally be ignored.
As far as whether the government should be interfering more, idk, I was just talking about moral culpability, not legal. Legally I think we generally should treat this stuff similarly no matter the victim's relationship to the perpetrator.
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