The Letter Formerly Known As Scarlet

Like most people, i'm sorry that a man as decent as house Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde came to be outed for infidelity. I got the same letter about Hyde's affair from Florida retiree Norman Sommer that 57 other reporters received. I tossed it into the large pile of mail I will never answer, not because it was written in crayon (actually, it was neatly typed, lucid and provided names) but because one person's bad behavior doesn't mitigate another's. Nor does Hyde's affair take away from his qualifications to chair possible impeachment proceedings. If you were to set up a "he who is without sin" standard for casting stones, few stones would ever be cast in Washington.

Republicans cleverly distracted attention from the Salon magazine article about Hyde by charging that it had been planted by the White House, as if stories magically appear on desktops courtesy of West Wing scribes. With poor Hyde "in play," as we pundits say to justify piling on, I called Sommer to find out if he thought the world was a better place for having been informed about Hyde. He was too busy to talk; NBC was filming, CNN was in the on-deck circle, and print reporters were stacked up like jets at LaGuardia.

It's that pileup that shows what is really wrong with exposing Hyde's past, aside from hurting him and leaving even innocent bystanders--like the press!--at risk of a sexual inquisition. Holding up adultery to the light of the 24-hour news cycle has bleached the scarlet A. When used to bludgeon a political foe, adultery is not a human tragedy but a political one. "Will it hurt his poll numbers?" becomes the question, not how broken and scarred a spouse and children may be. With the press reveling in scandal (although we insist that we are not), even good people make bad excuses, searching for an asterisk to put beside their adultery ("It's old," "I was young," "It's over," "My wife forgave me"). The result is to "define adultery down" (with credit to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued six years ago that we were "defining deviancy down" by failing to be outraged by the social decay all around us).

We expect excuses from Clinton. His supporters argue that the voters elected an admitted adulterer, so they should have factored in the possibility that he would cheat again. The "What did you expect?" excuse rests alongside "Other Presidents have done it," "Sophisticated world leaders are not alarmed," "It wasn't really sex," and "Whatever it was, it was private."

Surely Hyde, a straight-shooting Catholic who speaks eloquently and frequently on the sanctity of marriage, does not believe in an "I was experimenting with adultery" type of excuse, when adultery is a mortal sin by his standards, nor in "youthful indiscretions" beyond the "statute of limitations." But Hyde shrugged off accountability. I'm an expert on age 41, when his five-year affair began, and it's hardly young. Maturity should have kicked in by that time. Yes, it was a long time ago and Hyde's marriage survived, but the pain he caused in the Snodgrass marriage and to the three children was lasting, with wounds deep and fresh enough that the husband and a daughter agonized over it publicly. It wasn't Adultery Lite to them, and Hyde would have reinforced family values by affirming that it was a terrible thing he did and he is deeply sorry and ashamed.