Spitzer is caught between morality and law

Hah!  Let’s swerve away from our (kinda) usual programming and talk about what’s obsessing America.  Namely, Elliot Spitzer paying for it.  Our ever insightful media is running full steam with this and why not, it’s been a while since we’ve had a good sex story like this (Larry Craig barely counts since he denied everything and stonewalled) especially since Spitzer is a man who has presented himself as such a moral pillar.  He is going to go down.  There seems little debate about this now, but the why is the interesting bit.  He’s going down for two related reasons.

The Law.  Spitzer is a man who built his career enforcing the law.  And now he has broken it.  At the end of the day, when all else has been dissected and discussed this is the fact that will remain.  Prostitution is illegal.  When he solicited sex for money he broke the law and this is what will kill him in the end.  And it’s a shame, it’s a bad law and it’s no where near the kinds of laws he’s used to put away corporate criminals but in the eyes of the public he is the same as those who he’s prosecuted.  And when I saw the prostitution law is a bad law I mean in it’s intent.  Hardly any prostitution laws on the books are there to help women, they are there to legislate morality, a particular antiquated conservative form of morality, and that is the second thing that will bring him down.

Morality.  Yes he broke the law, but that’s not what fascinates people about this.  We barely care about the law these days, at least the sanctity of it.  Most Americans’ knowledge of the law extends only into those laws they find interesting or those which they can use to disapprove of the behavior of their fellows.   And so Spitzer will be vilified, particularly among the more conservative and judgmental among us for violating morality.  And why?  What he really did wrong was break the law, the issue of sex outside of marriage is not one usually legislated (as much as some would wish it) and not what he did wrong here.

But in the end he will go down because he did something that offends our American morality and because the way he did it broke the law.  The people who are in a feeding frenzy of gossip would hardly care if he had been caught cheating on his taxes, and Spitzer’s career would probably not have been over if he’d been like every other politician and just fucked his intern.  But the combination of the two is what’s going to kill him.  He broke the law, and he did it in a morally spectacular fashion.