“ Politicians are merely doing what everyone else is. Driven by sexual needs, feelings, or impulses, regular people across America gamble with their marriages, their jobs, and their health every day. It’s just that no one outside their small circle cares. Of course, ordinary people don’t have the power to regulate others’ sex lives. And they don’t have a big platform from which to talk about the bad people and bad behavior they’re trying to regulate. Americans love when politicians get in sexual difficulty because it allows us to salute the norms we claim to live by—and don’t. It allows us to solemnly talk about how people should live, even though we don’t. It allows us to piously talk about what people shouldn’t feel, even though we do. We get to have our psychic cake and eat it too: we get to validate the sexual norms we want to pretend we follow, while continuing to defy them. As a bonus, we vicariously enjoy others violating those norms. So Ensign and Sanford will be lynched by an ecstatic public mob. In a satisfyingly familiar ritual, a religious sacrifice will be made to appease the gods, as careers are ended and dreams are dashed. Still-trusted politicians will intone that since the public won’t trust people who lie about sex, those caught must go. And the public will eagerly agree, saying that such people shouldn’t be representing us in government. Really. Are you also going to fire your eye doctor, supermarket checker, airline pilot, and the guy who cleans your street on Tuesdays? Because they’re doing it, too. Whatever you’re doing, they’re doing, just like Ensign and Sanford.
