J. Goodrich of TAPPED raises a good question about when or whether it’s appropriate to discuss people’s sexual proclivities.

Louisiana Senator David Vitter has come clean about once having been a client of a Washington D.C. escort service…

I don’t usually write about politicians’ private lives or family members as those are none of my business. So why the deviation from that rule in this post? Because of the policies Senator Vitter has supported. He is a fervent defender of the traditional marriage and also an advocate of abstinence-only policies…

Taken together, Vitter’s support for abstinence outside marriage and his defense of the traditional heterosexual marriage might mean that gays and lesbians in his ideal world would have to practice life-long celibacy. To expect that of others and yet to fail (most likely more than once) with the much smaller challenge of marital fidelity makes Vitter into either a hypocrite or an unrealistic policy-maker. Or both.

Read the non-excerpted version of Goodrich’s post here.

I think it’s fine to give people a pass on their peccadilloes, but only if their behavior has no bearing on policy.

The scandal about Senator Vitter and previous escort customer Randall Tobias is not that they were married men hiring escorts. The scandal is that they were unable to conform to abstinence-only, anti-prostitution, and anti-infidelity policies even though they were knowledgeable about and responsible for implementing those policies!

If abstinence-only policies don’t work for Vitters or Tobias then they’re bad policies! That’s the scandal. And that’s where it’s not just appropriate but pretty responsible for the non-yellow press to dig it out.

Bottom line: if one thinks this is a sex scandal yeah, one probably shouldn’t write about it because generally one would be missing the real scandal.

[Other links on this topic: Contradictions vs. hypocrisy, prostitution and propriety; It’s still not about the hypocrisy, it’s about the program —fl]