Back during Monica Madness, Edwards said:

“I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.”

I don’t disapprove of sex between unmarried people. I don’t see a problem with sexual non-exclusivity for married people (provided they’ve agreed to it). My issue is the hypocrisy and the flaming, idiotic censoriousness.

I agree with Feministe:

Bill Clinton and JFK, two presidents rumored to have had large numbers of affairs in addition to those we know about, were consistent in their views of the privacy of human relationships. Edwards, on the other hand?

In late December 2006, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, Edwards said, “Do I believe they should have the right to marry? I’m just not there yet…” (This was during the same time period as his affair with Rielle Hunter).

This seems more reminiscent of Ted Haggard or Larry Craig, taking positions on family values and then specifically contradicting those.

It’s important, in my opinion, for a representative to actually represent her or his stated values. Whether it’s an anti-choice politician who puts his female relatives in a different class from poor women with less access to abortion, or an anti-gay-marriage politician who behaves as if “family values” are important for … others.

Normally, I agree with Debra Haffner but somehow the values she’s stating with which I agree in her post are at odds with the post itself. This paragraph in particular bothers me:

Nothing, really nothing, is ever private between two people. Someone always tells someone. And the less the other person has to lose, the more likely they are to tell more people. In fact, unless it’s your life partner, only have sex with someone who has as much to lose as you do. Sex workers don’t. Neither do women or men in their twenties. Oh, and the scrupulous use of birth control and condoms are not alternative behaviors. One can only hope that Mr. Edwards knows for sure that this is not his child.

For Debra this passage is unusually censorious. It reflects an often unspoken Puritanical attitude one finds among even American liberals concerning sex.

Which brings me to this next idea. H/t to Amanda at Pandagon:

I have profound qualms about any would-be politician who hasn’t allowed him- or herself a moment of untrammeled human or chemical exploration. I fear that the media have driven an awful lot of interesting people away from public service for reasons that would have seemed extreme to the second generation of New England Puritans.

The expectation that politicians will somehow be above all reproach is not only absurd, it’s beyond the pale of human expectation. It suggests to me an embarrassing lack of maturity among Americans. As children we want and expect Mom and Dad to be perfect, to know how to solve every problem, to overcome every obstacle. As we grow older, we should learn to see them as flawed human beings who do very often don’t even do their best and still be able to accept them as human beings. The idea that our leaders should never have sexual indiscretions is the first kind of love – that you must never let me down, you must never be anything but perfect.

It’s time to reconsider how we treat out politicians. If someone talks “family values”, we have every right to expect him/her to walk the talk. You want to lecture the rest of us about how bad homosexualty is? Don’t get it off with men in the airport bathroom. Don’t leave your first wife because she’s not pretty and young and rich enough for you (Yes, John McCain I’m looking at you); don’t divorce your first wife while she’s in the hospital with cancer for a younger woman. Don’t lecture the President on his affair while carrying on one of your own (that means you Newt).

But, if you are consistent in terms of your respect for the privacy of personal relationships, then you have earned the right to have your mistakes and failures remain private. John Edwards lost that right and now he’s reaping the rewards of his own attitudes.