The Question: What does the Eliot Spitzer scandal say about our public and private morality? Should he have resigned?
In the barely concealed glee that accompanied Gov. Spitzer's downfall, there's been a consistent theme: hypocrites deserve what they get. There was plenty of fuel for such a judgment, since Spitzer signed into law the nation's toughest penalties against men who solicit prostitutes. He was a zealous moral policeman, now ensnared in his own traps. But we shouldn't miss the prime issue here, which can be stated as a question: How much good have the moral police ever done? A predictable number of hellfire preachers have turned out to be Elmer Gantry, and some sheep-faced politicians who made a show of public piety pursued private sexual shenanigans. The spectacle is sad, laughable, unstoppable, and as old as the id.
Policing morality falls into the same category as demanding public professions of belief in God. It all but forces hypocrisy, sometimes on a grand scale, more often not. Morality, if it's to live up to the name, is based on tolerance and forgiveness. Nobody should have sex in a glass bedroom, open to scrutiny by bluenoses and voyeurs. Nobody should pray in glass churches, for that matter.
As to the specifics of the case, prostitution is a victimless crime as long as minors aren't involved, or sex trafficking of unwilling women, or physical abuse. In a decent moral setting, the federal investigators who accidentally came upon Spitzer's transgressions would have brought their discovery to him privately, informed him of the risk he was running, and then left the next move to him. He might have atoned; he might have sincerely changed. Turning his dalliance into a medieval morality play about the Devil grabbing a sinner by the tail follows a puritanical value system that we would all be better off leaving behind.
What would we exchange it for? Psychiatry, mythology, and spirituality all speak of a "shadow" that underlies the psyche, and society in general. In the shadow we hide all that we are ashamed of, and yet repression never heals the darkness within. The unconscious erupts, either in one man whose sexual appetites drove him with reckless abandon or in a society that wages vengeful war against innocents. Each of us lives within the danger zone of the shadow, and until we learn how to bring its secrets to light and redeem our own suppressed violence and shame, Eliot Spitzer won't be the only one who pays the price.
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