M: I think I am safe to assume a monogamous relationship when people have made a public statement of monogamy called marriage. Q: Perhaps this "public statement" you refer to is the 60-Minutes public spectacle in which the Clintons pretended to have a conventional marriage after Clinton was found to have been lying about his Jennifer Flowers relationship before he was ever elected president. Howeever, when you say "a public statement of monomgomy CALLED marriage" I must disagree. What one person calls marriage may be sexual monogamy, but not what another person calls marriage. There are certainly many persons who have even had wedding ceremonies in which they explicitly excluded any statement about an agreement to be sexually monogamous. M: Marriage is a legal contract. Q: Like all legal contracts, it is an agreement between two or more persons. Whatever the parties to a contract agree to is what the contract is all about. One cannot know what marital partners have agreed to as a couple by way of their sexual behaviors simply by virtue of the fact that they have agreed to be marital partners. M: (in the earlier mesasge to which Dr. Klein was responding): "In this day of the president doing the nasty in the oval office corridor with someone young enough to be his daughter (which incidentally goes beyond...." Q: The "going beyond" was then alleged to be a dishonest breach of a marriage contract and behavior that was more than "sexual misconduct". Dr. Klein quite rightly noted only that there may not have a breach of a marriage contract, given what has come to light about the kinds of marital agreements between the Clintons. And Dr. Klein was quite right to note the fact that because the adult person with whom Mr. Clinton had a sexual relationship in the oval office was much younger than Mr. Clinton does not alone constitute anything problematic. The readiness to attribute sexual misconduct, dishonesty, and many other alleged afflictions of one's moral capacity is in evidence whenever one finds circumscribed boundaries, often inspired by religious traditions, imposed on the full range of human sexual expression to be deemed acceptable and worthy of understanding. It is a sad thing for me to see psychotherapists adopt this religiously inspired tradition of delimiting our understanding and acceptance of human sexuality. Dr. Klein's response was a helpful correction of two faulty assumptions about the full range of acceptable and understandable human sexual expression, and he serves as a very importantt voice for clarity and reasonablenes in creating acceptance and understanding of the full range of human sexual expression.
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