I leave it to the preachers (who seem no more and no less likely to engage in forbidden sex than anyone else) to define which sex acts are sins. Inside or outside of marriage, forcing your sexual desires on someone who doesn't want you is wrong. Cheating on your spouse (or any long-term partner) is wrong, because that generally means you are lying. Having sex with someone too young to make an informed choice--even if that person is willing--is wrong. And so forth. Some sexual behaviors--pedophilia and rape come to mind--are not only wrong but criminal. Crimes, as distinct from sins, obviously are public affairs. The problem is that the religious right wants to turns its definition of sin into a civil crime.

One thing is certain: even if you don't believe in an afterlife, you will be punished for reckless, selfish sexual acts in this life. But how does that make the misuse of sex different from every other form of human malfeasance?

The special American focus on sex, however, has distorted our political discourse and served as a barrier to rational ways of addressing public health problems such as venereal disease and teenage pregnancy. The religious right's opposition to educating teenagers about contraception--based on the ludicrous idea that knowing about birth control encourages promiscuity--has given us the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the developed world. "Abstinence Only" sex education is to real sex education as military music is to music.

More important, though, is the fact that our childish preoccupation with the sex lives of public figures, and with their stance on sexual controversies, has diverted attention from much more serious issues. Gay marriage ought to be much less important to all voters than the war in Iraq. The question of whether teenagers should have access to birth control ought to be less important than the question of whether all Americans should have access to health care. Rudy Giuliani's three marriages ought to be less important than the fact that he is a bully who can never admit that he has made a mistake. Hillary Clinton's toleration of her husband's infidelity ought to be less important than her evasiveness about where she stands on controversial issues, from the war to immigration.

The mutability of attitudes about sex, and the utter silliness of making private. non-criminal sexual or romantic behavior a standard for public office, is well demonstrated by the criticism of Hillary for staying with her husband. A generation ago, women who "stood by their man" were praised for keeping their marriages together. Now, according to the unforgiving, women are apparently supposed to cast out a cheating spouse. (Men too, I guess. French President Nicolas Sarkozy's broken marriage would, no doubt, have disqualified him for the presidency here.) In our sex-obsessed country, the glass-jawed Mitt Romney actually offers, as one of his qualifications for the presidency, the fact that he is the only major Republican candidate who is still married to his first wife, whom he has known since she was fifteen. And oh yes, Romney actually considers it appropriate to answer a reporter's question about whether he and his wife had premarital sex. Why not ask candidates at the next debate to raise their hands if they have ever masturbated? That, too, constitutes "sex outside marriage"--and masturbation is still considered a sin by a number of religious denominations.

While it may be historically mistaken to blame the Puritans for America's prurient emphasis on the sex lives of those who make the headlines, the elevation of private religious beliefs to a public mandate certainly does influence American attitudes about sex. Secular Europe has the right idea: unless you're talking about forced sex or sex that involves the betrayal of national security, the erotic lives of political figures generally have no business in the public square.

There is an exception to this rule--the hypocrisy exception. If someone like Sen. Larry Craig, who has pushed a fierce anti-gay agenda throughout his political career, is arrested in a public bathroom known as a place where men solicit anonymous sex from one another, it is fair to demand a public accounting. The issue is not sex but lying. It is past time for the American public to get over the puerile notion that sexual transgressions are inherently worse than other moral transgressions.