How many times does a prosecutor, faced with prosecuting some sympathetic defendant, pull out the whole “the law’s the law — respect it or our whole civilization will come crashing down” card?

More to the point of this particular prosecutor, Spitzer was notorious for threatening to drag through the mud those he was prosecuting, threatening to “out” all kinds of non-related, personal business.

So “Mr. Clean” had his whole career and family life come crashing down, and people are already beginning to say, “Hasn’t he suffered enough, already?” No. He hasn’t.

Let him suffer until he develops a taste for masochism.

But this is just a diversion from the real damage done to our liberties, sexual and otherwise by both centralizing terror-fighters and ostentatious, self-styled reformers like Spitzer.

The non-crime that Spitzer was pinched for was the “crime” of moving money around. Widepread evasion of IRS rules that made banks liable to report transactions over $10,000 morphed into a requirement under the tragicomically-named “USA Patriot Act” that practically any significant transaction made by an individual with any other entity generate a “Suspicious Activity Report” to the Treasury Department.

Even worse, this “structured” movement of as little as a few thousand dollars at a time is considered by the Feds to be prima facie evidence of wrongdoing.

The practical effect of this is a complete evisceration of the first, fourth,and fifth amendments to the US Constitution, without which we can have no meaningful privacy, sexual or otherwise.

The article just read like my own thoughts, seriously. Dissonant sexuality is one of the purer forms of self-expression. Society, in its constricting cubicles of social management, will never be able to fearlessly assess raw sexuality without formulaic structure. Cartesian emulation of an animal drive is predictable and controllable, therefore the conventionals zealously lay claim to their one-position sex and one-dimension drive.

Remove the sexual coordinates and you have chaos. In our views (Violet, Berlant, I and others of minds alike), a chaos most mysteriously wonderful… Vast galaxies of emotion straining against barriers of coldness, calculation and a muttered disbelief- this is what sex is in today’s America.

In terms of the essay itself, it is worth noting that Berlant celebrates sex without any romantic notions of sex during some murky human state-of-nature before civilization. Joyful, loving, celebratory sex probably isn’t very normal in the general course of human history. But like other of the dubitable and less dubitable accomplishments of human civilization, such a thing, I hope, is possible.

The very nature of sex requires a certain amount of trust in your partner. Especially once you move past the missionary position and start trying things that might be illegal in certain states. Spitzer violated that trust that his wife had in him.

If the governor had been single, it might be merely titillating that he was putting a call girl through college.

If it had become well known that his wife was sodomizing him with a strap-on, that might raise some eyebrows, but it would hardly result in the end of his career. It’s not about the sex. It’s about the trust.

In this particular case, it’s also about the hypocrisy. He has aggressively prosecuted others for doing the very same thing that he got caught doing.