Let me state upfront that I believe the infatuation with the private lives of public figures is a huge problem in the US. The “gotcha” culture serves little purpose beyond titillation, and is on par with the banal infatuation with celebrity culture that permeates the media today. But I am noticing a distinctly different tone in how two senators, Craig and Vitter, are being treated as their sexual behavior is trumpeted from the rooftops. With Vitter, there was rote condemnation combined with a little sympathy and embarrassment. There were no (serious) calls for his resignation, especially among his colleagues. But with Craig, it’s a different story. His alleged behavior is treated with barely-concealed disgust, little sympathy for his plight, and a major push to relieve him of his senatorial responsibilities and force his resignation.
I can only conclude that the different standard reflects the gender of the senator’s preferred sex partners. But was the behavior of Craig really worse than Vitter? Both committed adultery, which is a serious crime against justice (please note that this only holds if Craig did the kinds of things he is accused of, of which there is yet little proof). Both committed sexual acts that were morally wrong. As Catholics, we should not follow some of our fundamentalist brothers and sisters and trumpet homosexuality as the worst of all sins, which is bizarrely narrow reading of scripture. No, we must either analyze sexual sin through the lens of traditional natural law thinking (whereby the unitive and the procreative should not be separated) or the phenomenological approach that underpins the thinking of John Paul II. By these standards, both kinds of sexual activity in question are disordered, and it would be wrong to treat one as far worse than the other, simply because we have no experience with same-sex attraction ourselves.
And while both are sins, they are sins that I think need not have an impact on the duties of a public servant. I argued before that too much obsession with an individual’s private faults could amount to detraction, and that what should concern us is whether a public figure is betraying the public trust. Of course, there reaches a tipping point when private behavior does affect the ability of the public servants to serve the common good effectively, but we should always remain judicious in these matters. To put it another way: if only the media displayed the same zeal exposing corruption and lies in the policy domain as it did with sex, maybe we would not be in such a position today.
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