Does the Public Have the Right to Know about a Politician's Deceit and Infidelity?

Whether or not the latest accusation against presidential candidate Herman Cain is true—namely, has he until recently been engaged in a 13-year extramarital affair—it's very interesting to note the perspective of Mr. Cain's lawyer, who wrote:

Mr. Cain has been informed today that your television station plans to broadcast a story this evening in which a female will make an accusation that she engaged in a 13-year long physical relationship with Mr. Cain. This is not an accusation of harassment in the workplace —this is not an accusation of an assault—which are subject matters of legitimate inquiry to a political candidate.

Rather, this appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults—a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public. No individual, whether a private citizen, a candidate for public office or a public official, should be questioned about his or her private sexual life. The public's right to know and the media's right to report has boundaries and most certainly those boundaries end outside of one's bedroom door.

In contrast to this compartmentalization view—where covenant deceit and infidelity are irrelevant to one's character and leadership—Marvin Olasky writes in The American Leadership Tradition:

The Bible repeatedly attacks adultery, not because it is necessarily the greatest sin, but because it shows a breaking of vows that regularly leads to other ruptures.

People, of course, are not always of a piece. A statesman with a good marriage might not be able to run a good government. A statesman who worships sex rather than God is not always more likely to seek immediate gratification in public policy areas as well.

But it is unusual for lifelong recklessness and lifelong discipline to be combined in one leader, and when they appear to be, shouldn't we watch for Jekyll to turn into Hyde?

In an article Olasky wrote:

Faithfulness to a wife is no guarantee of faithfulness to the country; look at Richard Nixon. Nor does faithfulness guarantee a strong presidency: Jimmy Carter's anti-adultery bent accurately forecast an administration that was also open and aboveboard—but sometimes incompetent.

We need all the information we can get about candidates. The Founders established the electoral college, instead of creating a direct democracy, because they wanted individual voters to choose electors whose character they knew—and those electors would then select a president whose character they knew. Today, we depend on media representatives to tell us the truth, even when it means exposing a candidate playing footsie with falsehood.