Sin generally and adultery specifically is the stuff of which soap operas are made, whether as the fiction of afternoon television or an affair of state that leads to impeachment. It’s just irresistible narrative, with all the attendant subplots of passion, guilt, deception, exposure and expiation. But in the United States there’s the added ingredient of overweening hypocrisy.

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Without quite naming names, Mitt Romney stood before the press and public in Texas yesterday and harked back “almost 50 years ago” to a time when “another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion.”

Romney was talking about John F. Kennedy, of course. But let me say, having just read that speech given almost half a century ago, Mitt Romney you are no Jack Kennedy.

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“Well-intentioned religious believers”? That phrase, I confess, makes me deeply uneasy. In practice the selflessness of such people can be awe inspiring. In horrible conditions, their powerful faith gives them the strength to endure, to comfort, to heal. But at a policy level when they see practical problems through the narrow prism of dogma the results can be shocking.

The example of the Catholic Church, with its vast human resources and intense convictions, is particularly striking. It is committed to honor and preserve life. But how best to do that? General principles are easy enough to pronounce, but specific cases are the source of enormous anger and misunderstanding, both inside and outside the church, and none has been more contentious than Vatican opposition to the use of condoms to fight AIDS.

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