On Washington ethics

By David Scott

It is hard to escape the sense of moral twilight extending out from our nation’s capital, a dimming of the day in which our leaders can no longer see clearly enough to distinguish service from license, morals from money, ethics from expediency.

Consider the remarkable fact that, in the course of a single week, the two most powerful men in country, the President and the Speaker of the House, were scrambling to defend themselves against apparently well-founded charges, respectively, of badgering an unwilling women for sexual favors and of misusing tax-exempt donations and lying to Congress.

A generation after Watergate, we have become a people beyond outrage, even beyond cynicism as we hear daily tales of political aides curled up at the feet of prostitutes, politicians selling “access” to the highest bidder, their intimates scheming to cheat taxpayers, and everybody lying to keep the press and the special prosecutor off the trail.

We have become a people accustomed to setting the bar lower and lower, until mendacity and hypocrisy are our only expectations of our leaders.

And the day-in, day-out routinization of ethical scandal has a barely perceptible but corrosive effect — increasingly, lies and shallow self-ambition also become our only expectations of ourselves and our neighbors.

We have turned the governing of our lives into a spectator sport — we chose up sides, designate ours as that of the angels. Calling any rules arbitrary and biased, rejecting any outside referees, we say “our” guys can do no wrong, and we mean it quite literally.

“All’s fair in a war,” we will say, equating our own group’s naked self-interest with the good of the country. Or we will plead equivalencies of immorality: Sure what our guy did is bad, but it is “relatively minor” when you compare it to what your guy did.

Of course, there is too much money in politics, too many temptations that flow from power, too much hubris, too many life-and-death decisions that have to be made and too little time for moral reflection in the insanely busy days of our leaders.

But there is no excuse for an abandonment of ethical reasoning. What we risk losing is a capacity to think and talk morally about the failings of our politicians and our own failings as citizens.

But sin is sin, in thought and deed, in what is done and in what is not done. Never does it cease to be a sin just because we have taken to calling the bad things people do “improprieties” or “indiscretions.”

As many a politician is finding out, secret sins do not stay secret long, especially in a culture with a bottomless appetite for scandal and titillation. And in their recent time of troubles, both the Speaker and the President have found cause to invoke God and ask pardon—if not for sin, at least for “the appearance of wrongdoing.”

One can only hope this is a sign that all has not grown dark yet in Washington, that there remains a flickering memory that sin is not a metaphor.

For all we know, or used to know, sin is real in the eyes of the Lord, whether or not the sinner gets “exposed,” and the wages of sin not repented are likewise real, whether or not they get paid in this political lifetime.