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What in the Sam Hill is going on in South Carolina anyhow?
A conservative blogger’s sensational confession of an extramarital affair with the front-running gubernatorial candidate in the Republican primary is only the latest in a series of GOP sex scandals that have erupted recently in this straight-laced, intensely religious enclave of the Bible Belt, where pious Southern Baptists have been regularly assaulted with steamy revelations of shenanigans between the sheets.
On Monday, blogger Will Folks claimed that he’d enjoyed an “inappropriate physical relationship” years ago with married mother of two Nikki Haley, the state representative leading in the polls—and endorsed by Sarah Palin—in a four-way race to succeed Gov. Mark Sanford, for whom Folks once worked as press secretary.
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Folks’ admission—which Haley vehemently denies—has sparked an orgy of lascivious headlines. It follows the bizarre cases of Sanford (who has taken “kiss-and-tell” to unprecedented levels of loquaciousness); state Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom (whose illicit adventures with school superintendent candidate Kelly Payne are laid out in seamy emails); and the granddaddy of all priapism, South Carolina’s late senior Senator Strom Thurmond—of whom his Senate colleague John Tower famously remarked: "When Strom dies, they'll have to beat down his pecker with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid." (Shortly after his death at the overripe age of 100, Thurmond’s family publicly confirmed what was already widely known—that this notorious segregationist, the 1948 presidential standard-bearer of the Dixiecrat Party, had sired an African-American daughter from a dangerous liaison with a house maid.)
• Rebecca Dana: Why Women Don't Have Sex ScandalsSuch headline-grabbing examples don’t even account for what the locals describe as a libidinous, drug-and-alcohol-fueled atmosphere that pervades the state capital of Columbia, where rumors swirl about various public officials’ sexual orientation (prompting one of Nikki Haley’s primary opponents, bachelor Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, to publicly deny that he’s gay), and where former Republican State Treasurer Thomas Ravenel pleaded guilty to charges of cocaine distribution. Then there are the persistent public speculations about the personal life of South Carolina’s bachelor senior senator, Lindsey Graham, a political moderate who is constantly coping with character attacks from his right flank.
“The Republican Party in South Carolina is not a political party,” says Democratic activist Dick Harpootlian, a noted lawyer and Palmetto State wag. “It’s a toga party.”
Harpootlian, a former state Democratic Party chairman, has some intriguing theories on why this might be so.
“Why, in this is a very conservative, Bible Belt state, have we got a Republican Party wracked by scandals involving sex, sex, sex?” he asks. “How do you explain this about a party that promotes almost Puritan virtues, is against the teaching of evolution, believes in creationism, fervently prays for prayer in school, doesn’t want sex education, and opposes abortion rights even for a woman who has been raped?”
Harpootlian’s answer: “I think it’s simple physics: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So what we see is that the more morally strident they become in the public square, the more debauchery we see behind the curtain. This is Victorian England, where everyone was prim and proper in society and everyone was rolling around in the sheets behind closed doors.”
Harpootlian continues: “The best way to describe it is that when I was young, I went to a number of country funerals. You go to a wake, and you’d have the casket in the parlor with the widow and the preacher, and—even though Southern Baptists are not allowed to drink—you’d have all the guys out in the backyard drinking liquor out of a Mason jar. What’s going on in the parlor, versus what’s going on in the backyard, is very common in our culture. So I’m not shocked by any of this.”
As for the secret-sharing Folks, it seems he is taking his cues from his former boss, Gov. Sanford, who has given countless interviews and press conferences concerning his relationship with an Argentine girlfriend, apparently believing that South Carolina’s citizens are hungering for every sordid detail of his lustful misadventures and he cannot in good conscience let them starve.
Explaining why he is coming clean now instead of allowing details of his alleged fling with Haley to leak out, drip by drip, Folks wrote on his blog: “I refuse to have someone hold the political equivalent of a switchblade in front of my face and just sit there and watch as they cut me to pieces… Several years ago, prior to my marriage, I had an inappropriate physical relationship with Nikki… It is what it is, and aside from the Haley family—Michael, Nikki, Rena and Nalin—I feel no need to apologize or explain myself to anyone. People are human. We make mistakes. And as I have learned from experience, the key to life isn’t the mistakes we make, it’s how we choose to handle them.”
As conspicuously as possible, at least in South Carolina.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.