Most Germans, like most Europeans, a few years ago could only shake their heads in incredulous amusement over the fuss made in the US when former president Bill Clinton shared some kind of intimacy with a young office employee named Monica Lewinsky.
Who cares? was the general sentiment which people on the European side of the Atlantic had about the Clinton-Lewinsky tangle -- it was the president's private business and nobody else's.
Today, Germany is experiencing the same kind of soul-searching about the private sexual lives of politicians and just what, or how much, the public needs to know about it in the wake of an unsavory scandal which has rocked the northern port city of Hamburg.
In the affair, Governing Mayor Ole von Beust and his Justice Minister, Roger Kusch were outed at a press conference as homosexuals by the Interior Minister Ronald Schill in the culmination of an alleged corruption affair in the government apparatus.
Schill went on to allege that the mayor and the justice minister were also a gay couple. While astonished reporters listened, Schill mumbled remarks about how he had received "information" about the activities by the two men together which pointed to sexual acts.
The unsavoriness of Schill's remarks -- made moments after von Beust had announced he had fired him and his undersecretary in the alleged abuse of office issue -- generally angered the Hamburg public.
But it also raised questions about whether the Hamburg mayor may have helped to fuel the situation himself by having previously declined to declare his homosexuality. Schill, so the thinking in some gay quarters went, may have thought he still had some leverage over the mayor simply by dangling the threat of outing him, because von Beust steadfastly declined to declare what was regarded as an open secret in Hamburg.
It is not that von Beust -- from the right-of-center Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party which espouses family values and has a generally more conservative view on social morals -- would lack a precedent, if he did so.
Berlin's popular Social Democratic mayor Klaus Wowereit outed himself as a homosexual during the election campaign a few years ago, famously declaring: "I am gay, and that's a good thing." Voters overwhelmingly elected him to office.
In the newspaper interviews in the aftermath of the unsavory press conference remarks by Schill, Justice Minister Kusch did openly state, "Yes, I am gay." But von Beust continued to be evasive, saying sexual orientation was a private matter.
"Whether somebody is gay or heterosexual, what somebody does in bed is his own private matter," he told the mass-circulation tabloid Bild. "And by the way, I am of the opinion that homosexuality is something normal."
The rest of the interview concerned mainly his relationship with Kusch, whom the mayor has known since university days 25 years ago and who also rents an apartment owned by the mayor.
But both von Beust, 48 and Kusch, 49, flatly denied that they were a gay couple as insinuated by Schill. Von Beust acknowledged that he and Kusch in the past had been on vacation and went sailing together -- however, not alone but along with other people.
Newspaper and broadcast media commentators, political analysts and readers writing letters to the editor are all asking the same question: Are any of these private details about the mayor and the justice minister any of the public's business?
RSS