Have you been a Dave Letterman fan? Are you still? Are you disgusted by his affair(s), or are you as cynical as the rest of his viewers are said to be?
Earlier this month Letterman shocked his audience and viewers by jokingly confessing to an affair with one or more women who had worked for him. He was being blackmailed for $2 million and decided to head off the publicity damage by admitting it himself and controlling the story. His audience laughed all the way through his “confession,” apparently willing to believe that this was one of Dave’s gags.
Feminists are outraged. Letterman as boss had power over these women, they say, and could intimidate them and create a climate of fear in the workplace. Oh, I dunno. Seems to me Stephanie Birkitt, the only one identified so far, did OK. Getting a multimillionaire to sleep with you is no mean feat. He paid for some of her law school tuition. I think she had more leverage over him than vice versa—he had a lot more to lose by their affair’s being made public than she did. If there was a climate of fear, Dave was living in it. God’s inner voice of the law, his conscience, apparently also was still functional. He opened his confession by saying that he was a man who lived with a lot of guilt.
Proving the public relations maxim that there’s no such things as bad news in show biz, Letterman’s ratings have shot up. Poor Conan is probably racking his brains to come up with a stunt in return.
There has been a lot of tut-tutting and scolding about the lack of morality in all this. Letterman is indeed married, but not by much—he and Regina Lasko were married earlier this year in March after living together for over 20 years. They have a child together, born in 2003. Apparently the new Hollywood morality says that committing adultery is OK, but only with one woman at a time. I suppose that Dave and Regina have had some very earnest conversations in the past couple of weeks. I wish them well and hope that they can find a way to stay together.
Evangelical Protestants should save their fire and brimstone, however. A threat to marriage in America that scares me a lot more was reported by Lisa Miller in the October 19 Newsweek. She quotes Pew Forum statistics that evangelical Protestants are more likely to be divorced than Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists. If we are going to talk pro-family and pro-marriage talk, perhaps we ought to spend more energy on walking that walk.
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Straight talk. Real hope.
