Sex, scandal and hypocrisy

Republican Sen. Paul Stanley's decision to resign his seat in the Tennessee Senate "due to recent events" -- a self-serving way to describe his extramarital affair with a 22-year-old intern that prompted a tawdry blackmail case -- marks, one must assume, the end of his political career. The announcement, though, is more than that. It also is another painful reminder that elected officials properly pay a high price for preaching one thing and doing the opposite.

Mr. Stanley, married and the father of two young children, announced his resignation, effective Aug. 10, during a Tuesday interview at a Memphis radio station. "I want to apologize for my actions and falling short," he said. The senator, who represented a suburban Memphis constituency, might be sorry now for the affair that led to his resignation, but it seems he's more upset at getting caught than about the appalling lack of judgment his escapades clearly demonstrate.

Mr. Stanley's admitted affair may or may not violate legal statutes, but it definitely contravenes the generally held moral code prevalent in the workplace. It is never acceptable under the latter for a person in power -- the senator, in the current instance -- to use that position to convince or coerce an employee who reports to them -- the intern -- to engage in a relationship beneficial to the former and detrimental to the latter. Mr. Stanley clearly crossed that line.

His action is particularly egregious. Mr. Stanley won office and built a reputation as a family-values conservative and a protector of public virtue. He publicly opposed family planning, said youngsters should not have sex before marriage, and tried unsuccessfully to prevent unmarried couples -- his real target, it seems was gay couples -- from adopting kids. And he never missed a chance to say that faith and church were important to him. What hypocrisy.

As long as he could get away with it, Mr. Stanley was comfortable preaching highly moral concepts in public, but violating them, especially when it involved his own private sex life, in private. It's hardly a wonder that his own party quickly abandoned him when the full story of his affair with Ms. Morrison, who apparently is still married to a man serving a prison sentence in Florida, became public knowledge. His party could do nothing less if it was to retain any hope of public acceptance.

Mr. Stanley, of course, isn't the first elected official to get caught saying one thing and doing another. And it's unlikely he'll be the last.

Recent history is replete with prominent elected officials who erroneously believed it possible to separate their public pronouncements from their private lives. Sen. John Ensign, the Republican from Nevada, and Mark Sanford, the GOP governor of South Carolina, recently admitted to affairs. Before them, Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana and Eliot Spitzer, the now resigned Democratic governor of New York, acknowledged their own sexual peccadilloes. All, like Mr. Stanley, are proof that holding office is no guarantee of responsible behavior.

Mr. Stanley's admitted marital infidelity and the resignation it prompted should be a lesson to social conservatives and others in public life who mistakenly and publicly impose their own moral benchmarks on others and then fail to measure up to those standards. Individuals are judged, and properly so, by their actions and not their words.