Baptist Chareidim

I came across a blog called “Stuff Fundies Like,” a Baptist Fundamentalist analog of the blogs of the Jewish-skeptisphere. As always, I was struck by the similarities between fundamentalist versions of religions. Not so much in the post I was reading (Top 10 Things Fundies Expect People To Say), but in the comments:

“I’m so glad you taught me the importance of swimming in a shirt and pants. It makes swimming so much easier!”

“Thank you for suddenly opening my eyes to the great depravity inherent in shoulders and knees.”

“Hi neighbor, I noticed that your wife never wears pants. Even when she is gardening. How can I be sure if I were to be hit by a bus today that I would go to heaven?”

“Thanks for letting me know that all men are lying in wait to sexually assault me at the first sign of skin. Even Pastor! I’m so glad I know now that their self-control is MY responsibility.”

Tznius!

“I noticed that your family never plays in the yard on Sunday. What must I do to be saved?”

Many yeshivish/chassidish people consider playing ball on Shabbos to be “not Shabbosdick.”

“Are you sure the standards in this church are strict enough? Shouldn’t they be stricter? I need more rules!”

Chumros!

“I was going to get saved but then I saw you leaving the movie theater with your family. Now I’ve changed my mind and it is all your fault.”

I was told by my rabbeim that we have a responsibility as yeshiva bochurim to act in a certain way, because people would judge Yiddishkeit by our actions.

“You graduated from Fundy U? With an unaccredited theology degree? That’s enough for me, you’re hired!”

Getting a job after beis medrash/Kollel.

“I was SO IMPRESSED by the way you bowed your head for so long in prayer before you ate your meal at the restaurant and how you left that tract”

Bentching, Breslovers distributing their pamphlets.

“After seeing your book burning the other night at the church, I’ve realized that I need to be more totally surrendered to your cause and remove all my “idols” from my home like my tv, dvd player, and xbox.”

Wasn’t some rav burning a dumpster full of TVs a few months ago?

“Thank you for your teaching on Homosexuality. I will no longer have any sympathy for Gays”

“You never drink, go to concerts, movies or sports events, watch television, or do anything fun? Tell me how to get saved so I can have such a fulfilling happy life!”

“Pastor: I am going to be retiring soon and would like you to consider hiring my nephew to take over the pastorate when I am gone.

He was a youth pastor in Connecticut and then replaced his father as pastor at a church in California (after his father was caught in adultery), so he brings in a lot of varied experience. My nephew has apologized for molesting the youths and for sleeping with several married women and has put all this behind him.”

How many roshei yeshiva inherit their positions? To say nothing of Rebbes. And the Agudah’s current stance on molestation.

“You must have the truth since you get so passionate in defending your faith when people ask you difficult questions. I don’t blame you for not answering them, and rebuking those who question you.”

How dare you ask such questions, you apikores?! There are no questions, only answers!

“-We’re strangers to each other, but I noticed that you and your sons are wearing slacks and collared shirts, while your wife and daughters are wearing ankle-length skirts. Clearly you must have the answers to all that pertains to life and godliness.

-I noticed that you refuse to put anything else on top of your Bible. What must I do to be saved?

-I was looking at your military-style hair cut and your fifties style clothing, and I realized that I could read the gospel all over you, even though I have never been in a church or heard of Jesus before.”

Dressing strangely is religiously virtuous, not putting anything on top of seforim.

Pathologizing Porn

Yesterday Frum Satire posted a link to an Aish article titled “X-Rated” which decries the evils of porn and gives advice for avoiding temptation. Unlike most such articles these days, it doesn’t immediately launch into a tirade against the internet. The article starts with the author looking through porn magazines at a local store as a kid, and only towards the middle of the article does the internet come up. What it does do is something that I’ve been seeing more and more of over the past few years. It claims that looking at porn – and by implication, masturbation in general – is pathological.

The article treats porn as an addiction, and the comments on the article take it even further. Commenters talk about porn and masturbation in the same terms as substance abuse, discussing how long they’ve been “clean” and groups and therapies they’ve used. I have two issues with the characterization of masturbation as a pathology.

The first is simply that it isn’t true. Sex addiction as a disorder is itself controversial within the mental health community. It has never been included in the DSM, the official manual of disorders published by the American Psychological Association. While there is a sizable contingent of mental health professionals who think that sex addiction is a real pathology, looking at porn and masturbating do not by themselves mean that someone has an addiction. Frequent repetition of a pleasurable activity does not constitute an addiction, especially one for which there is an innate biological drive. Are we all addicted to food? After all, most of us eat three meals a day plus between-meal snacks.

The use of the word “addiction” in the Aish article and other similar articles is a common, frustrating phenomenon where people attach their own definition to a word, then use that word to make their point. “Addiction” has a real meaning. The following is a proposed diagnostic criteria for sexual addiction:

A maladaptive pattern of behavior, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by three (or more) of the following, occurring at any time in the same 12-month period:

1. tolerance, as defined by either of the following:
          1. a need for markedly increased amount or intensity of the behavior to achieve the desired effect
          2. markedly diminished effect with continued involvement in the behavior at the same level or intensity 2. withdrawal, as manifested by either of the following:
          1. characteristic psycho-physiological withdrawal syndrome of physiologically described changes and/or psychologically described changes upon discontinuation of the behavior
          2. the same (or a closely related) behavior is engaged in to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms
3. the behavior is often engaged in over a longer period, in greater quantity, or at a higher intensity than was intended
4. there is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control the behavior
5. a great deal of time spent in activities necessary to prepare for the behavior, to engage in the behavior, or to recover from its effects
6. important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of the behavior
7. the behavior continues despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the behavior.

Of these, the only ones that are applicable to the writer of the article (based on what he relates in the article) are 4 and 7. He therefore doesn’t meet the diagnostic criteria for sexual addiction. Other proposed criteria I’ve seen are substantively the same as the above, and he would similarly fail to meet the criteria for diagnosis.

Regarding 4,, I think that, given that sex is a biological drive like eating and not a superfluous activity like drug use or gambling, that trying to cut sexual gratification down to near-zero as the article author does is unrealistic. Much like someone attempting to fast indefinitely will very quickly succumb to hunger, so too someone who is trying to so severely limit his sexual satisfaction will inevitably succumb to temptation. This will then be interpreted as a failure to control the behavior, even though he may have been successful had he set more realistic goals.

Regarding 7, there is no doubt that viewing porn and masturbation causes psychological distress to people who think these things are evil. And engaging in behaviors that cause distress is maladaptive. BUT there are two ways to alleviate the distress. The first is to change the behavior. The second is to change the thought patterns that cause one to see the behavior as a source of distress. The behavior as described by the article author is harmless. The greatest harm was the reaction its revelation provoked from his wife. The very fact that she was blindsided shows that he was not spending an inordinate amount of time on the activity, nor was it interfering with his other activities and responsibilities. If the author and his wife were convinced that masturbation is not evil, then the psychological distress would disappear.

The second issue I have with the depiction of masturbation as a pathology is, I think, more interesting than the mischaracterization of what is and isn’t an addiction. I was wondering, why is porn and masturbation being described as a disorder? Isn’t it enough that it’s an aveirah? After all, we don’t find anyone writing articles pathologizing chillul Shabbos. And I had a startling realization: no, it’s not enough! Pathologizing porn does all sorts of useful things.

It gives people a concrete reason to invest time, money, and effort into refraining from masturbation. There are many things that are aveiros, and which people work on. Lashon hara, for example, has become a popular thing to work at avoiding. But we don’t see the same level of investment from individuals to keep themselves from speaking lashion hara. Were someone to popularize gossip as a pathology, I bet we would see people agonizing over it, buying software, attending therapy groups, etc.

It also gives people a way to feel better about themselves. One commenter on the article writes,

“Addiction is a disease. Would anyone be embarrassed because they have high blood pressure or diabetes? It is not a weakness of character and will power has nothing to do with it.”

Viewing porn and masturbating are now not sins and moral failings, but a disorder to be treated.

In the same vein, one can be a good upstanding member of the frum community despite viewing porn because, as an addiction, he can’t help it. He isn’t a rasha, like the person who is deliberately mechalel Shabbos. He’s a victim of a pathology, someone to be pitied and helped, not someone to be vilified and cast out. This may be the most important thing that pathologizing porn does. As the joke goes, pollsters went around asking men if they viewed porn. The results of the poll showed that 80% of men admit to watching porn, and 20% of men are liars. If everyone who watched porn was vilified as a rasha and kicked out of Orthodoxy, there’d be no one left.

Prohibition

I recently finished watching Ken Burn’s latest documentary, “Prohibition.” Like all of his movies, it was engaging, discussing the subject mainly through the lives of people who lived through it, with occasional background filled in by the narrator.

In the mid-1800s drunkenness was a real problem in the US. America was internationally renowned as a nation of drunkards. The working class especially were prone to spend their evenings in one of the brewery or distillery owned saloons, drinking away their paychecks and coming home drunk to their families.

Groups such as the Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League were formed to combat the widespread drunkenness. They decried the plight of working-class families, left with no money to buy food and drunk, often abusive fathers and husbands. They blamed the brewery companies and their saloons, and pushed for legislation to limit and/or ban the sale of alcohol. The Prohibitionist movement steadily gained popularity, and laws were passed by local, then State governments. In 1920, after decades of lobbying, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was passed limiting the sale and ownership of alcohol. The legislation designed to enforce the amendment, the Volstead Act, outlawed anything containing one half of one percent or more of alcohol.

Exceptions were made for alcohol used for medicinal or religious purposes. In the first year of Prohibition, orders for sacramental wine from the Catholic Church quadrupled. Adult Jews were each allowed a certain amount of wine per week, and Jewish congregations that in 1920 had forty families saw their membership swell to over eight hundred by 1921. Doctors wrote millions or prescriptions for whisky and liquor.

Those who couldn’t get alcohol legally got it illegally. Shipments poured in over the Canadian and Mexican borders, and stills were set up in basements, barns, and caves all over the country. Illegal alcohol dealers became known as “bootleggers,” after their practice of keeping flasks of whiskey in their boots. Bootleggers sold to all levels of society, including some who made regular deliveries to Capitol Hill. Eventually bootlegging became organized, and people who would otherwise have been petty criminals became kingpins, overseeing huge distribution networks.

Illegal alcohol distribution resulted in low-quality, sometimes fatally dangerous drinks and in deadly gang warfare. On top of that, the government was no longer collecting the hefty tax it had previously gotten from alcohol. It was instead spending money trying to enforce Prohibition.

Unfortunately, no one wanted to pay for it. The federal government authorized only a few thousand Prohibition agents for the whole country, figuring that it would mostly be dealt with by local police. Local governments, for their part, figured that it was a federal law and therefore the responsibility of the federal government. The result was half-hearted enforcement of a law that was increasingly unpopular and ignored.

About ten years into Prohibition, groups were formed to lobby for its repeal. Oddly, they lobbied using the same anti-alcohol arguments that groups like the Anti-Saloon League had been using. Except instead of decrying the saloons, they decried the speakeasys, the illegal bars that littered every major city. The speakeasys were even worse, they said, because unlike the saloons they were frequented by women and minors as well as men. By 1933 the Twenty-First Amendment was passed, ending Prohibition.

As I watched, I was struck by a number of things.

First, that Prohibition had been an important issue in American politics for about a century. American politicians’ positions on Prohibition could make or destroy their careers, and the country was divided between the “drys” (those in favor of Prohibition) and the “wets” (those against it). And it wasn’t as if there was nothing more important going on. Campaigning for Prohibition started not long before the Civil War, and Prohibition ended during the Great Depression. Yet today Prohibition is not at all part of the American consciousness. It’s a few paragraphs in history textbooks.

Second, the parallels between the attempt to control alcoholism by criminalizing alcohol and the current war on drugs are obvious. It didn’t work then, why would anyone think it would work now? The only difference I can see is that drug use is not generally culturally significant the way that drinking is. Most people are not accustomed to having heroin with their steak or going out for a joint with their friends after work. Still, the criminalization of owning and distributing drugs is the same as it was for alcohol, the existence of a widespread black market, the laws creating the impetus for gang violence and organized crime, and the disproportionate number of people in prison for it are all the same.

Third, and most relevant to us in the Jblogosphere, is the complete ineffectiveness of blanket bans, especially when contrasted with regulation. Banning alcohol, while it did relieve some problems, was largely ineffective in combating alcoholism, and on the whole made things much worse. People who wouldn’t have gone to a saloon, such as the upper classes and women of all classes, went to speakeasies every night. Some people went just to spite the law. Prohibition created “a nation of scofflaws.” People who would normally never have broken the law ignored Prohibition because, after all, everyone did. Prohibition is also responsible for the existence of modern organized crime. The territories carved out by the various illegal distributers are the same ones used today by the mob.

Instead of attacking the brewery and distillery-owned saloons, teaching people how to drink responsibly, and developing programs to help alcoholics control their drinking, groups like the Anti-Saloon League pushed for the complete banning of alcohol, and eventually wrote the federal enforcement laws so that even today’s cough medicine would be illegal. It backfired spectacularly.

The elements of Orthodoxy that are prone to bans aren’t much given to studying history, even Jewish history. But it would serve them well to study Prohibition. Here was a movement with popular support, a movement that got a Constitutional Amendment passed, something that had to pass by a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate and then be ratified by three-quarters of the State legislatures. It had the authority of the federal government behind it, its own enforcement bureau, and in theory local law enforcement. And yet it failed utterly. About all it did was destroy the saloon system, and that could have been done without trying to force people to completely give up drinking. So what makes anyone think that top-down unpopular bans with no enforcement apparatus are going to be effective? Why not learn from Prohibition’s mistakes, and attack the real problems rather than trying to make them go away by banning the mediums through which they appear?

God the Locksmith

Last night I was installing a lock for a customer when I had help from God.




They had given me an old lock that they had taken off of their front door asked me to install it on the back door. The back door already had a (broken) lock, so it was just a matter of swapping the broken one for the good one. Normally it’s a quick job, but this lock was giving me trouble. I just couldn’t get it to work properly. Either the inside part worked, or the outside part, but they wouldn’t both work at the same time. After fiddling with it for a half hour, I was ready to give up. My hand was hurting from holding the two halves of the lock together around the edge of the door, and I had run out of ideas. The quote from Einstein that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” was running through my head.



I figured I would leave the working lock in the door to cover the holes and go tell them that it was beyond my skill level. As I tightened the screws that held the lock in place, I thought that a believer might be praying for God’s help at this point. How nice it would be if there was a God to reach down for me and miraculously make the lock work! Once the lock was in place, I decided to try it one more time, on the off chance that I’d finally gotten it right. Surprisingly, it worked!



So, did I get help from God? Or is it just a coincidence: as a result of the culture I grew up in and my penchant for theological musings, I happened to be thinking about God miraculously helping me just before I accidentally got the lock’s mechanism in the right configuration?



On the one hand, were someone to tell me that they base their religious beliefs on experiences like the one above, I would dismiss it as ridiculously weak. We are conditioned to appeal to God in nearly every situation. Inevitably some of the time things will happen to work out, and it will be attributed to God. On the other hand, an experience like this one is pretty powerful. I can see why a believer would see discounting it as perverse. Logic is one thing; direct experience is another. For someone who is used to seeing the Divine in the world (and who isn’t inclined to philosophically examine every event in their lives), it seems obvious that only a terribly misguided or evil person would ignore such direct experiential evidence of God.

We’re Too Late

Last night I was sitting in my living room, trying out the new recliner I just bought (very comfortable!) and reading “The Hebrew Goddess” by Raphael Patai when I had an awful realization: the fanatics already won! Those of us who bemoan the slide-to-the-right are thousands of years too late.




When I was a kid in school learning Navi the impression I always got was that the people the neviim denounced as evil idol worshipers were the exception, aberrations from the normative worship of Hashem in the Beis Hamikdash. Unfortunately, these few had strayed, and even more unfortunately, at times the idol worshipers were a significant portion of the Bnei Yisroel, but most people most of the time were exemplars of Jewish faith, pious people who we would be happy to welcome into our communities.



Is seems that this impression, like so many others, is wrong. The “The Hebrew Goddess” contends that the majority of the people the majority of the time worshipped “Yaweh and his Asherah,” and often other gods as well. Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess who is the villainess of Talmudic polemics, was worshipped by virtually everyone as Hashem’s wife. Statues of her, referred to as “Asherahs,” were everywhere: small clay figurines in people’s homes, large pillar-like wooden statues in public spaces on baamos (high places) and under trees, and most shocking of all, in nearly permanent residence in the Beis HaMikdash. The author points out that:



“We find that the worship of Asherah, which had been popular among the Hebrew tribes for three centuries, was introduced into the Jerusalem temple by King Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, in or about 928 BCE. Her statue was worshipped in the Temple for 35 years, until King Asa removed it in 893 BCE. It was restored to the Temple by King Josh in 825 BCE, and remained there for a full century, until King Hezekiah removed it in 725 BCE. After an absence of 27 years, however, Asherah was back again in the Temple: this time it was King Manasseh who replaced her in 698 BCE. She remained in the Temple for 78 years, until the great reformier King Joshiah removed her in 620 BCE. Upon Joshiah’s death eleven years later (609 BCE) she was again brought back into the Temple, where she remained until its destruction 23 years later, in 586 BCE. Thus it appears that, of the 370 years during which the Solomnic Temple stood ion Jerusalem, for no less than 236 years (or almost two-thirds of the time) the statue of Asherah was present in the Temple, and her worship was part of the legitimate religion approved and led by the king, the court, and the priesthood and opposed by only a few prophetic voices crying out against it at relatively long intervals.”



Entire generations lived and died while Asherah was in residence in the Beis Hamikdash. They saw her when they made their pilgrimages during the shalosh regalim. She was served by the kohanim, the rites passed from father to son to grandson without interruption. Worship of the divine couple WAS normative Judaism; the strict monotheism of the neviim was the aberration. Those calling for the removal of Asherah must have been regarded as fanatics, the lunatic religious fringe. Yet they won.




Imagine what it must have been like in those periods when the king was one of the fanatics. Royal troops tore down the sacred Asherah in the Beis Hamikdash, perhaps over the protests of the kohanim. Soldiers ranged the countryside, desecrating sanctuaries set up with local donations and destroying public places of worship. They raided people’s homes and seized Asherah figurines that may have been in the family for several generations. Far from the joyful return to pure Judaism that is portrayed in Nach, it was a time of religious persecution.



Nor did the people easily come to agree with the fanatics. Again and again, the Asherahs were destroyed by purist kings only to quickly spread again once the persecution of Asherah worship was lifted – and be destroyed yet again when another fanatical king came to power.



From the point of view of the average First-Temple-Era Jew, kings like Chezkiah and Yoshiyahu weren’t tzaddikim, but instead played the same role as the yevanim do in the Chanukah story: that of religious persecutor and villain. Just as the yevanim outlawed Jewish religious rituals and practices, so too these kings outlawed what were traditional religious rituals and practices for the majority of Jews. Just as the yevanim desecrated the Beis Hamikdash, these kings desecrated the temples of popular gods and goddesses, and destroyed the sacred objects dedicated to Asherah and Baal that were found within the Beis Hamikdash.






This was just the beginning. As the centuries have passed, practices have come and gone, but the trend has always been towards more restrictive, more layers of interpretation and of halachah, more liturgy, more ritual. Men and women, who once mingled in the courts of the Beis Hamikdash and may have engaged in ecstatic orgies inspired by viewing the erotic statue of the keruvim, were separated and the women eventually removed to balconies. Feast days became fast days, and ascetic customs once observed only by the especially pious became binding on everyone.



We bemoan the creeping chumras that we see now, but these are only the latest symptoms of this long trend. We are much too late. The fanatics already won.

Pragmatic Morality

One of the many useful things that religion does is provide a framework for morality. If God has told us what is moral, then the sincere religious person can rest easy knowing that by following his religion’s dictates he is doing what is right.

Without religion it’s more difficult to define morality and to decide whether something is right or wrong. At that, without a divine mandate, the entire enterprise of determining what is moral is called into question. Why does is matter is something is moral? After all, what is considered “good” or “bad” is largely determined by a combination of social norms and biological instincts. Neither of those are important in a written-in-the-sky kind of way, so who cares whether something is moral or not! That the norms of my society or my instincts tell me that I shouldn’t do something is not in itself a reason not to do it.

I think both problems, creating a moral code and a reason to keep it, can be addressed by adopting a pragmatic approach. And I think that a good starting point for a pragmatic morality is the Golden Rule. As Hillel phrased it: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

This is entirely pragmatic. If everyone follows the Rule, then we will all be treated well by everyone else – and that also provides the reason for behaving morally. I must behave morally because if I don’t, the system breaks down. It may be in my best interests at the moment, to, say, steal something from the grocery. If I do, though, then my fellows hano longer have motivation to treat me well – since they are treating me well in order that I treat them well – and the system breaks down. Inevitably, someone will steal from me – something that I don’t want to happen. Therefore I refrain from stealing from the grocery store in order to maintain the universal agreement that we all treat each other well.

The Golden Rule provides a simple, though not easy, basis for judging if an action is moral. If I were the person my action is affecting – not if I was in his place, but if I was him, with his likes and dislikes, his personality, his history, etc. – would I want to be treated that way? If yes the action is moral, if no then the action is immoral.

Of course, as with any moral system, there are gray areas. For example, giving a child a shot. The child certainly doesn’t want to be stuck with a needle, but it is in his best interest. Perhaps we could say that, if he knew that it was in his best interest, he would want it – except that forcing someone against their wish to do what we judge to be in their best interest is a dangerous road to go down. This needs more thought.

There is also the problem of bringing criminals to justice. A criminal who recognizes that what he did is wrong is not much of an issue. We look at it from his perspective, and try to treat him as we would want to be treated if we were caught doing something wrong. If I did something wrong, I would like understanding and compassion, but I recognize that there must be immediate consequences to deter people for whom the long-view of keeping things pleasant for everyone isn’t enough to keep them from breaking the moral code and ruining things for everyone else.

But what about someone who believes that what he did is right? I certainly wouldn’t want to be punished for something that I thought was the right thing to do. Not that I would want to be punished for something that I agree was the wrong thing, but there at least I can recognize the necessity of the punishment and acquiesce.  And what about someone who ascribes to a different moral system? We cannot subject him to the consequences of the Golden Rule moral system – after all, we would not want to subjected to consequences under the rules of his moral system. This also needs more thought.

These are some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a while. A fully-developed moral system is beyond the scope of a single blog post, and likely beyond my amateur attempts at philosophy. I kind of like this idea, though. Any thoughts on how to make it more coherent?

Choosing Biblical Friends

Who would you rather hang out with, the great tzaddik Dovid HaMelech or Eisav HaRasha?

Let’s compare them:

Job
Dovid was a shepherd. Eisav was a hunter. Both involve killing animals, but shepherding involves caring for the animals, which is traditionally considered noble.

Marriage
According to the medrash, Eisav married idol-worshipers. Not ideal, perhaps, but it’s not like he had real options. Even his brother Yaakov’s father-in-law was an idol worshiper, and at least one of his wives believed in idols enough to steal her father’s in order to rob him of their powers.

David married the king’s daughter, all well and good. Later, though, he notices a hot girl bathing and arranges for her husband to be killed so that he can have her.

Fealty to father-figure

Eisav was devoted to his father, and often brought him food. David deposed his father-inlaw Shaul after committing treason and fighting for years alongside the Philistines, the Israelites’ mortal enemy.

Decorum

Eisav sells his birthright for a bowl of soup. He didn’t value it much, but even so, this seems rash. Still, it was Eisav’s to sell, and he didn’t actually do anything wrong. David dances before the aron and in his enthusiasm gives the crowd a good look at his privates – which both violates the halachos of tznius and isn’t appropriate behavior from anyone, let alone the king.

Battle
According to Rashi, Eisav killed Nimrod, the evil king who tried to barbeque his grandfather. David killed Goliath, a menacing enemy warrior, but a man about whom we otherwise know nothing. It’s entirely possible that Goliath was a better person than Nimrod. Yet for killing Nimrod, Eisav is denounced as a murderer, while for killing Goliath, David is praised as a hero.

Family Relationships
Eisav wants to kill Yaakov after the brashos are stolen from him, but eventually forgives his brother. Dovid son goes to war against him, and ends up dead.






Neither of these figures are paragons of virtue, but between the two of them, I’d rather hang out with the guy who has a good marriage and isn’t chasing other people’s wives, who’s good to his father, and who won’t inadvertently expose himself when he gets excited.

You know, like this.