The Prurient Trap

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

“Hiking the Appalachian Trail.” Is that what we’re calling it these days? That’s what Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina told his staff that he was going to do when he absconded to Argentina to be with his “sweetest” Maria of the “magnificently gentle kisses.”

I had no particular interest in rubbernecking this disaster. People make mistakes. The flesh is weak, the heart disobedient and marriages hard. According to the General Social Survey, about 10 percent of married people admit that they have cheated on their spouses. And, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll taken in March last year, 54 percent of Americans say that they know someone who has been unfaithful. ’Twas ever thus.

At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing while doing another.

There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot.

(More here.)