One more historical dispute has been settled by DNA analysis, according to today’s New York Times: Nan Britton, who claimed to have been a longtime mistress of President Warren G. Harding, did in fact bear Harding’s child out of wedlock in 1919, when he was in the Senate.

Despite the old Harding family story that the president had been left infertile by a childhood case of the mumps, the Times reports that his genetic material lives on in Britton’s grandson. Nan and Warren definitely did it. Maybe, as she had written, they did it a lot, notoriously including a quickie in a White House closet.

As it is the unavoidable function of history to shed light on our own present condition, the question naturally follows: Would you?

Would you have sexual intercourse with President Warren Gamaliel Harding, if he were alive and available?

The Times, bless its heart and other body parts, goes to the trouble of putting this matter in its appropriate context:

[Britton] was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive.

Ever objective and epistemologically demure, the Times isn’t saying that Warren Harding was attractive. Just that he was seen—by women of the time—as attractive.

The Times also reports that the DNA investigation, checking rumors of Harding’s “black blood,” “found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa.” Taken literally, this would mean that Warren Harding’s ancestry diverged from the rest of the human line more than 4.4 million years ago. (What we write around when we write around race!)

So: Warren Harding. Successful, six feet tall, generally regarded as handsome, possibly a member of an entirely different species. Also notoriously callow, dimwitted, and incompetent; a keeper of at least two mistresses; and a man who left no provision for the support of his own offspring.

Here, for further consideration, is a photograph from his pre-presidential days.

Yes or no? Vote below!

Photos via Getty