Bill Clinton. Mark Sanford. John Edwards. Tiger Woods.

Nearly everyone has an opinion about these men, each of them, and what each of their situations “revealed” about their true characters. 

Not so fast, says a panel of experts in a Q and A for The New York Times about sex addiction. Please read it. These experts, in very little space, help make clear the differences among clinical diagnoses which have brought these men down so far. The panel experts make clear that indeed there are narcissists who just don’t have a conscience and behave accordingly but they also go on to refine the definitions of the term used for all of them.The term, the diagnosis, has been slung around casually. It is  “sex addiction” and it has been used in a way that seems to suggest that we are all attending the same medical conference.

This are not simple cases of arrogant men brought down because they could not stop chasing. True, they could not stop but the reasons are not simple. People are not simple and they most certainly are at their most complex when the subject is their sex lives.  These are tragedies, each one of them.

This is not meant to defend or to condone any of them. It is meant only to say nothing about their individual falls from grace is simple—even medical experts have to do a lot of work to figure out what the correct diagnosis or diagnoses are for each of them.

I find the over-simplifying over their down-falls troubling. People “know” what kind of man would do that. Do we? Do we really? Certainly, these men need their ministers, priests or rabbis as much as they need their doctors  but do they need us to consign them to categories? Judge them for all time?Are we really able to do that?

The humiliation of having one’s most private business paraded, not only before the world but before one’s own children, is a punishment few of us can even begin to imagine. Everyone knows everything about you as it related to the scandal. Every humiliating little detail. The wives and the children also pay for all time because the Internet sees to that. Since children don’t really like to think that their parents have sex, it is even worse for the kids.

We don’t have to re-elect these men or buy the products they endorse once their scandals hit.

We should grant them the privacy they need to put their lives back together. Compassionate people are capable of that. We Americans think that we are compassionate. There is a glee in these revelations that is not becoming to us. This is a different kind of test of our character.

As long as we insist on believing that public policy cannot be made by people who are “not like us” or who could “do that,” our addiction to gossip definitely is interfering with our ability to focus on the people’s real business—this country, our priorities in a difficult time and how it does the work of governing.

The New York Times

Source: New York Times, February 25, 2010