The US Senate s3x scandal

RECENTLY, a United States Senate staffer, Aidan Maese-Czeropski, was alleged to have been involved in a s3x session in a Judiciary Committee hearing room. He was said to have engaged in the act with another male. As massive outrage greeted the act, the office of his employer, Democrat Senator Ben Cardin (Maryland), announced on social media that the culprit no longer had his job. A spokeswoman for the senator said: “Aidan Maese-Czeropski is no longer employed by the US Senate. We will have no further comment on this personnel matter.” According to reports, the 24-year-old legislative aide had posted the offensive video on a public X account. His face was clearly visible, according to The Spectator, the medium which first broke the story of the desecration of the same room where nominees to the Supreme Court are usually grilled by senators. The graphic video was later published by other media outlets.

Of course, stories of s3xual immorality associated with US congressmen and politicians in general are not new. To take only a few examples: in 2011, congressmen Chris Lee (Republican) and Anthony Weiner (Democrat) assaulted their own careers through sexy selfies, the former involving a shirtless pose and the other involving the crotch. In 2018, Rep Joe Barton aborted his re-election plans after his nudes, sent to a woman he was in dalliance with, were leaked online, and North Carolina rep Madison Cawthorn lost his primary after videos emerged of him engaged in both conventional and gay sexual encounters. Former US President Bill Clinton also engaged in s3xual encounters with an intern. But while sexual deviance is apparently a feature of modern US life, the case involving Maese-Czeropski is shocking. He did not just desecrate a supposedly sacred place and institution, he personally made the video of the violation available on a public platform. That partly accounts for the outrage that greeted his action.

This case certainly exemplifies the desecration of sacred places around the globe. Hardly anywhere is sacred anymore: leaders and their followers treat sacred national spaces and monuments as personal property. This is the kind of absurdity that accounts for singing the anthems of political parties and campaigns on the floor of the Parliament. It amounts to the trivialisation of governance at a very disturbing level. Yet, regardless of what appears to be the shifting grounds of morality, there ought to be places where certain kinds of behaviour should not even be mentioned, let alone perpetrated.

The growing degeneration in the world is certainly reflected by the Maese-Czeropski case. Imagine the brutish audacity of the former staffer who not only openly engaged in sexual acts in the office and during official hours, but recorded himself doing so! The only consolation is that the United States still has a vestige of institutional integrity that swiftly imposes penalties on offenders for such atrocities, quite unlike Nigeria where degeneration without consequences has become the official norm. We expect the Nigerian system to learn from the institutional mechanism surrounding the instant case. Notice should be taken of the fact that the media exposed the atrocious behaviour, with many of the media outlets amplifying it to ensure it received maximum public airing, and of the swiftness with which the US Senate attended to the issue, with the staffer already out of work even before all the media outlets could air the story.

The entire episode shows the responsiveness of the US system and its capacity to sustain its integrity by swiftly and appropriately punishing deviations. We hope that Nigeria and its leaders will learn and realise that the whole system epitomizes a lack of integrity where deviations are tolerated and treated with kid gloves, if not pats on the back. There is a need to ensure that degeneration is not allowed to become the norm as the whole system will likely be destroyed in the end through such permissiveness. As we have said time and again, societies like Nigeria must have a system where there are very severe consequences for crime. We believe that objectionable behaviours would not thrive with severe sanctions in place.