I was glad to see the often rogue Democrat/Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema leave Congress and my ethics scrutiny because she was a one-woman EA spelling landmine: I always wanted to spell her first name “Krysten” and her last name “Cinema.” But a federal judge last week cleared the way for a the wife of a man she had been having an affair with while she was a U.S. Senator to litigate a North Carolina “homewrecker” lawsuit against her.
Good.
To be fair, Ethics Alarms had extolled Sinema a couple times in the past, most recently in 2021, when I wrote:
“Totalitarianism takes a hit! Is it fatal? Senator Krysten Sinema (D-Az) is suddenly evil in the eyes of progressives hoping to ram through SCOTUS packing, gun restrictions, D.C. statehood, HR One and other measures designed to make the US a one party, European-style nanny state until the stars turn cold. She announced that she is unalterably opposed to eliminating the filibuster, meaning that it’s probably here to stay, at least for a while. The ethical response to this development would be for the two parties to stop insisting on extreme positions, and work toward compromises, as our system was designed to foster. Nah.”
Nonetheless, Sinema carried on a sexual affair with her bodyguard (heh!), leading to his divorce. Sinema’s lawyers had asked U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon to toss the suit, arguing she had no meaningful ties to North Carolina and had conducted her affair with Matthew Ammel entirely in other states. Bragdon, rejected that account in a 13-page order.
She’s a piece of work. Her wiki page makes for interesting reading. I have to wonder what benefit she provides to a mega-firm.
In my experience, the destruction of marraige does nto merely come from within the mariage. It is often facilitated by forces outside the arital domain. Our present societal norms, at large in particular, is culpable. Marriage is disrepected in the cinema, the media, in politics and legislation.
75 k is not enough compensation, more should be extracted from both the paramour and the exhusband for the destruction of the family, which was and ought not be the bedrock of society.
The amount of damages will be determined during the trial. $75,000 is most likely just a nominal sum included in the complaint to get things rolling.
In an affair like this both participants are to blame. We cannot redirect the blame to society, as liberals like to do (Hey Officer Krupke, I am depraved on account of being deprived), and we cannot absolve the bodyguard using the theory (or the legal fiction propagated by sexual harassment law) that the sexual relation was without his consent. His wife surely did not judge it that way, as she sought it fit to divorce him for his unfaithfulness. A divorce will hurt him much more financially than Kyrsten Sinema ever could. He should have followed his big head instead of being led by his little head.
Marriage is not the bedrock of society anymore like it was in the nineteen fifties, prior to Ronald Reagan as Governor of California signing into law no-fault divorce. Divorce was a scandal back in the day. Now it has become socially acceptable, up to celebrations of a divorce. I am glad that North Carolina still has laws on the book that shows some respect to the institution of marriage.
What happens if we reverse the roles? What if it is a male senator and a female employee? Do we hold the female employee as accountable as we are holding the male bodyguard, or are women less capable of controlling their emotions and not responsible for their actions?
This led to an interesting turn of events at UNC-Chapel Hill. It turns out that English professors across the country had a newslist of female students willing to have sex with professors. The professors would even write letters of recommendation (to grad school, etc) for such students to other members of the newslist based on ‘performance’. They also awarded student scholarships similarly. Well, a new Chancellor, Michael Hooker (a boon to the headline writers of the student newspaper) took over and didn’t take kindly to this sort of behavior. When a wife filed an alienation of affection suit against a student of her husband, Hooker fired him. Even though the professor had tenure, there was a clause that allowed the firing if the faculty member committed a crime using university property. Since he had given her a scholarship and had sex with the student in his office, he was fired. The humanities faculty went into an uproar. They declared the alienation of affection law ‘barbaric’, puritanical, and uncivilized. They basically claimed that they should be immune to the laws of the ‘backward South’ because they had degrees from prestigious schools in the Northeast.
Typical Newsletter headline of the time, “Faculty Office Sex Spurs Trustees to Demand Closed-door Meeting with Hooker for A Second Full Day”.
What the bolded misspelling “Sinima” in the intro deliberate irony?
I’ll never tell. But since you were the only one who noticed, I fixed it.