Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Republican

by tristero

The issue is not that Republican Senator John Ensign had an extra-marital affair. That’s between he and his wife. It’s that he made a big deal out of the fact he promised not to:

Mr. Ensign, 51, is married and has three children. During college at Colorado State University, he became a born-again Christian and he and his wife, Darlene, were active in the Promise Keepers, an evangelical group.

Again, to be clear: I don’t expect, or even want, politicians to adhere to Puritan moral standards. I truly don’t care who they fuck, or don’t. What matters is whether a politician is honest in his/her work life. Furthermore, it is vitally important that our politicians be sane, something that would go without saying in a different era, one not overrun with rightwing nuts who have a tenuous grasp on consensual reality.

What’s annoying, however, is when politicians flaunt their adherence to Puritanism, as if the unimportant fact that they only fuck their spouse makes them some kind of moral exemplar (see, eg, Nixon, Richard). And what is truly galling is when politicians who claim to be Puritans turn out to be the most cynical of hypocrites. It really is high time this country grew up, stopped expecting its politicians to be paragons of “virtue,” AND stopped holding up the moral code of superstitious witch-hunters as the gold standard for American personal behavior.