You don’t cast pearls before swine....you have to be mindful of the audience you are venting your spleen to. Of course one might admit one’s weaknesses...with other Christian males at a prayer breakfast; for scripture tells us to “confess one’s faults one to another”. Scripture doesn’t tell us to confess them to a writer from Playboy who will probably deliberately misinterpret and misconstrue the context from which your true confessions derive!
I believe had Carter made these comments to a writer from Christianity Today(of 1978-79 not today’s mess), we would have had a more contextualized and better understanding of what Carter was trying to say as opposed to the slanderous mess we got from Playboy.
He was running for President, not for Saint. (And I think we heard similar here, when our current president was running - many of us said that we were electing a president, not a pastor - and many of us who love and support President Trump have sometimes felt that his words, in certain situations, have been somewhat ill-advised.)
It may have been a mistake to grant an interview to Playboy in the first place; but I find his admission - and what I believe to have been a sincere impulse behind it - to have been a sign of his recognition of his own humanity and flawed human condition.
What would ‘they’ have made of it, if he had NOT been straightforward; tried to maintain some illusion that he was perfect and had ‘never lusted’ in his heart - when almost every red-blooded man - and woman - HAS done?
(When you run for President, come back and tell us of all the bad advice you received from advisors, all the mistakes you made, all the times you were blindsided, misrepresented, your words quoted incompletely or taken out of context.)
I’ve never been a ‘fan’ of the political Carter. I think he was very naive, over his head in the presidency, and very misguided in some of the ways he has acted.
My interest in this thread has been a human one - he’s very old and sick, he’s done a lot of good work during his life despite the poor decisions that we may regret; and he has a family that loves him. It’s a moment when we should be ‘Christian’ - to use what appears to describe your own identity - and charitable.
There will be plenty of time to write more history, and further condemn, later.