THERE ARE PLENTY of people who cheat on their spouses, plenty of people who hire prostitutes. It’s hardly unheard of for an office to be plagued by a boss sending sexually explicit emails to underlings, even much younger ones, or for a man to solicit sex in a public restroom or to hire a male prostitute and then buy drugs from him. In other words, it’s not just public figures with careers built around denouncing moral turpitude – crusading prosecutors like Eliot Spitzer, evangelical leaders like Ted Haggard, socially conservative politicians like Mark Foley, David Vitter and Larry Craig – who end up confessing to those very acts. And yet, with the back-to-back revelations of marital infidelity by Nevada senator John Ensign and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, two more cultural conservatives, the question once again arises: why is it that people who set themselves up as moral paragons seem to have the hardest time living up to their own standards?
more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.