Is what a politician does with his animals his own business?

Some people (for convenience, I’ll use the word “liberals” to refer to those people) argued in the wake of the Weiner scandal that politicians’ personal lives should not be our concern. They can’t really believe that, though.

Suppose a politician is found to have murdered his wife rather than simply cheated on her. The politician’s act of murder is part of his personal life rather than his political life — would liberals encourage us to ignore the act of murder when deciding whether to vote for the politician?

Maybe liberals would argue that murder, since it is a criminal act, is a sort of “public” act since it forces the politician to be engaged with by the state, and thus it is of public concern. That argument can easily be refuted by considering a case where the politician, instead of murdering his wife, took to the high seas in an unflagged sailboat with a bunch of animals and tortured the animals to death. In this case, since the animals cannot file suit (both because they are animals and because they are dead), and since the act took place outside of U.S. jurisdiction, there would (I believe) be no engagement of the politician by the state. This act of torture would truly reside firmly in the politician’s personal life. Would liberals encourage us to ignore the torture when deciding whether to vote for the politician?

No. When liberals say “ignore a politician’s personal life,” what they really mean is “ignore a politician’s marital life.”

And, lastly: some people argue that since Anthony Weiner “wasn’t a hypocrite” with regard to his marital infidelity, we shouldn’t be as harsh on him as we are on, say, Republican lawmakers who both preach family values and are found to have cheated on their wives. This argument is totally bogus for 2 reasons: 1) Most politicians preach honesty; thus, when they cheat on their wives and then lie to the press, they are being hypocritical with respect to the action of being honest. And 2) Who decided that hypocrisy is the big-ticket sin anyway (rather than, say, plain old dishonesty)?