IN DEFENSE OF BILL BENNETT

What, I ask myself, has he conceivably done wrong? He has done nothing illegal. He has done nothing hypocritical. Only in the minds of a few religious fanatics, has he done anything immoral. This invasion of his privacy and attempted smearing of his character have been perpetrated for transparently political reasons and are yet another sign of how our culture is making it increasingly difficult for any actual living, breathing, fallible human being to function in public life, without profound personal costs. Is it relevant that Bennett is a “moralizer”? Not in the slightest. He hasn’t moralized against the alleged “vice” he has engaged in; in fact, the record shows the opposite. Yes, he has hob-nobbed with the likes of James Dobson and other theocrats. I hope this episode might open his eyes to the extremism of their agenda. But if our standards for anyone in public life are human perfection, we will have no public life. And if no one can advocate virtue or responsibility or morality without also being a saint, then our common moral life will also collapse. Bennett deserves privacy; he deserves whatever means he can legally use to relax when he is off duty. He is a human being. His smearers on the left merely show what has happened to our politics. When the Washington Monthly does in this decade what the American Spectator did in the last, you can see how widespread the rot has gotten.