Two recent happenings in Annapolis reveal a disturbing truth.
Even in this post-"MeToo” age, politicians who make inappropriate comments toward women remain sadly common. It becomes especially jarring when those comments are captured on state-run media and reported, somewhat cheekily, in the local press.
That’s what happened in early March when Maryland’s First Lady, Dawn Moore, appeared before the Senate Finance Committee. It isn’t every day that the governor’s wife sits in the witness chair, and her appearance understandably drew attention.
During the hearing, Sen. Ben Cramer (D-Montgomery) joked that he envied his Senate colleague for persuading Mrs. Moore to testify and wondered aloud how he might inspire her to champion one of his own causes. “I just want to know how I can make that happen because I am so jealous,” he said.
Encouraged by laughter in the room, he went further — and that’s when the moment turned uncomfortable.
“And if I may, First Lady, if you ever get bored with the governor … I’m just putting it out there.”
The suggestion, though delivered as humor, wasn’t subtle. Some will dismiss the episode as harmless banter meant to lighten the seriousness of a legislative hearing. Perhaps that’s what the senator intended.
But the comment was still inappropriate.
Why? Because the joke rested on a very serious matter: infidelity. Even joking about it cheapens something that ought to be treated with respect.
The Maryland Family Institute frequently disagrees with Gov. Wes Moore and the First Lady on matters of public policy. But one of the most important contributions the governor has made to life in Maryland is not political — it is personal. He is married to the mother of his children. In an era when marital commitment is too often discarded, the example that Wes and Dawn Moore set through their fidelity is a good one for Maryland families to see.
That commitment deserves respect, not casual jokes about breaking it.
The timing is particularly unfortunate because Maryland already faces a crisis in family formation. Across our state and across the nation, fewer adults are marrying, more children are born outside marriage, and family instability continues to rise. As our own research has shown, family breakdown correlates with nearly every other social challenge we face.
The second disturbing development in Annapolis points to the same deeper cultural drift.
Just this month, the Maryland House of Delegates advanced HB 457, a bill that would require all public restrooms in Maryland’s colleges and universities, public and private, to provide free menstrual products.
Current law already mandates free tampons in women’s restrooms. The new proposal would extend that requirement to men’s restrooms as well.
The biological reality, of course, is simple: only one sex menstruates.
Yet this bill would require institutions across Maryland to stock tampons in men’s bathrooms. One campus estimated the cost of implementing the mandate at nearly $500,000 in the first year, with roughly $250,000 annually thereafter for supplies and maintenance.
Some might object on fiscal grounds. Colleges already face serious financial pressures, and imposing another mandate may seem imprudent.
But there is an even more basic problem with the policy.
Men do not menstruate.
Providing tampons in men’s bathrooms is not a matter of compassion or public health. It reflects a broader effort to treat biological reality as negotiable and to affirm the claim that men and women are interchangeable.
Both of these incidents — an ill-considered joke about marital fidelity and a law mandating tampons in men’s bathrooms — reveal the same underlying problem: the erosion of traditional standards about sex and human identity.
For generations, American culture largely affirmed that sexual intimacy belonged within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman. Yes, people sometimes failed to live up to that standard. But when they did, it was widely recognized as a failure, not something to joke about.
Likewise, the biological differences between men and women were once treated as obvious facts of life. Menstruation was understood as uniquely female, and compassion for women who lacked access to necessary products was expressed in ways that respected that reality.
Today, those once-common assumptions are rapidly disappearing.
A joke about infidelity. A mandate for tampons in men’s bathrooms.
Taken together, they remind us just how far our culture has drifted from the moral and biological truths that once grounded it, and how much poorer our public life has become as a result.