Spitzer, Weiner hoping for forgiveness, perhaps Sanford-style comeback (AP via Yahoo! News)
Smerconish: We should legalize prostitution (MSNBC)

I often joke that I don’t have to worry about marketing The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon as a topical book; as long as we have male politicians, some scandal involving prostitution is sure to be in the news. That said, the phenomenon of sex scandal-disgraced politicians re-entering public service, while not new (just look up Jerry Springer’s pre-television political career — yes, I said Jerry Springer), seems to have ramped up this year, starting with Mark “Appalachian Trial” Sanford winning back his seat in the House of Representatives. Now two New York politicians, former Governor Eliot Spitzer and former Representative Anthony Weiner, are hoping to follow in Sanford’s footsteps and hold elected office once more. (If I wrote a script featuring a politician with the last name “Weiner” involved in a sex scandal, it’d be slammed as “too unrealistic” by every producer out there.)

Apart from the geographic locations, the most profound difference between the three politicians is in political affiliation; Sanford is a Republican, while Spitzer and Weiner are both Democrats. This has led to the all-too-predictable parsing between party loyalists, claiming their politicians are outstanding people who made an understandable mistake and learned their lessons, while the others are disgusting curs who will never learn and can never be trusted with the public’s confidence ever again. The hypocrisy is so redolent, I’m glad it’s still allergy season so I can’t smell it.

This does get to what is, or at least should be, ultimately at stake in a sex scandal: The issue of trust. Even though the salacious details of a sex scandal are what fuel initial public interest and sell magazines, the public’s real concern needs to be with the issue of trust. If a politician has vowed to be faithful to their spouse and clearly breaks that vow, then the public does have some concern about the politician being honest about other things. That is why most political sex scandals, as silly as they can be, have at least a thread of legitimate public interest .

As with same-sex marriage, though, this may be one of those issues where we may be witnessing a generational shift. Maybe it’s just because of the circles I run it, but many of my friends are either polyamorous and/or in open marriages, and I’ve heard several of them argue that monogamy is not a natural condition for humans. These are people who are not only okay with, but in some cases encourage, their partners to have other relationships, and I’m guessing this is something that is likely to become a bigger topic in mainstream discussions in the coming years. (If nothing else, it calls attention to the fact that even ten years after Lawrence v. Texas struck state sodomy laws down, adultery is still a criminal offence in twenty-three states. Three miles north of me, in Michigan, it can potentially be punished by life in prison. Seriously.)

There’s more at work here than just shifting cultural attitudes towards sex, though. We’re now years into the Twitter revolution, and what used to be the domain of trashy gossip columns and journals is now not only coming straight to us in our Twitter feeds, but often directly from the public figures themselves. If Patrick Stewart tweeting about pizza can become a mainstream national news story, it feels like our whole culture is already so deeply involved in the personal lives of others — celebrities or otherwise (and I say this as someone who’s tweeted for several years and blogged for even longer) that your everyday run-of-the-mill adultery scandal is hardly worth raising an eyebrow over. Maybe the stakes are raised a little higher when it’s a public official, but it feels like there’s a growing sense of apathy towards these kinds of scandals.

There are differences in the three politicians and their scandals, though. Mark Sanford’s adultery was compounded by his staff lying about his location while he went to visit his mistress (the whole “hiking the Appalachian Trail” thing), which again goes back to the theme of keeping the public’s trust. Weiner texting photos of his namesake made for some really uncomfortable television news stories. Spitzer’s case is the most interesting, because he gained his reputation as a prosecutor, and he prosecuted several prostitution rings before a prostitution scandal proved his undoing as governor. Unlike adultery, prostitution is illegal in all fifty states (save some counties in Nevada), which added a palpable irony to the events that forced him out of office, as well as a little extra titillation for those who followed the story.

It was in that context that I was somewhat heartened that Michael Smerconish — hardly anyone’s definition of a left-winger — used a segment on Hardball earlier this week to make the case for legalizing prostitution, using many of the same common-sense arguments that I and others make to argue for why we shouldn’t be legislating people’s private sexual matters. I have my disagreements with Smerconish on how legalized prostitution should be set up in America, but at least he added his voice to the debate and talked about how ridiculous it is that this topic, like many others, doesn’t get discussed like it should be, something I’ve already blogged about. Smerconish’s editorial isn’t likely to jump-start a national debate, but at least it’s one national voice in a debate bereft of widespread coverage.

I have an obvious interest in seeing that debate happen, and I make no bones about using my online presence to stimulate that debate. This is about more than me standing to benefit professionally from a climate more likely to lead to sales of my novel, though; this goes back, just like anti-GLBT laws, to the government’s role in legislating personal, private behaviour that harms no one. While the breaking of promises that politicians made to their loved ones is of some concern to the general public, and sex scandals can admittedly be interesting to follow, the criminalization of private sexual behaviour is something we should have moved past, as a culture, long ago. If the summer news cycle is going to be taken up by scandals, can we at least try to work some intelligent debate into the titillation?