Albert Mohler: The Strange Persistence of Moral Sanity

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The fall of yet another politician in a sex scandal has added a note of Schadenfreude to the political season. Coming so quickly after the fall of former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer, the admission by former Senator John Edwards of an affair during his presidential campaign seemed to catch many observers off-guard.

Sexual immorality crosses all partisan lines. Spitzer and Edwards are prominent Democrats, but equally prominent Republicans have been caught in the same web. There is no room for partisan calculation here.

One interesting aspect of the Edwards saga is the near-universal assumption that, had Edwards won the primary race for the Democratic presidential nomination, he (and his party) would have been fatally wounded in terms of the November election. This assumption, revealed in media coverage of the scandal, seems to be common to both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. The assumption is probably valid. the rest image