After a rousing week of battling a cold (sorry ’bout that) there is nothing more stirring than lounging on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, basset hound sleeping on the couch next to you, and reading the news.

And this story is like a tonic for the soul. (If you’re link-phobic, please know that the Christian pastor in New Jersey who was urging his married church leaders to de-friend Facebook, as it were, because it leads to adultery has been exposed as having three-ways with his wife and a male church assistant about ten years ago.)

OMG, this is like Christmas morning and there are about five million presents under the tree and I just don’t know where to start. So I’ll just start opening presents at random.

Silver wrapping/blue bow: It goes without saying that a past mistake (or in this case, series of mistakes) does not mean a person cannot lecture capably on the evils of making mistakes. We would all be a little disturbed if a known felon advocated robbing banks, or didn’t chime in that robbing banks was wrong if the topic came up. No one (especially me) would be able to parent a child if they couldn’t forbid the kid to do anything the parent had done in their presumably feckless youth.

No, making mistakes actually makes people better at lecturing credibly and capably, if they don’t try to pretend that they never made that mistake. If their mistake was a matter of public record, as it was for this pastor (the details had come up in a criminal case), one might pick one’s medium a little more carefully. In his case, knowing that this information is sitting out there like a big ol’ bagel, he might have not gone so public with his denunciations and just offered a private word-to-the-wise with his parishioners.

Gift bag that just might be a bottle of very good wine: This is real math. The volume of the admonition + the height of the pedestal + the amount of media coverage exponentially increases the probability that the speaker has committed the very same ‘crime’ he or she is denouncing, and also increases the probability that the ‘crime’ he or she has committed is worse than anything that has been denounced up to that point.

Case in point: Mark Sanford, the darling of the conservative, family-values bloc, and inexplicably still the governor of South Carolina. He was slated to be a speaker for the Family Research Council Values Voter Summit when he returned home to find the media waiting for him after ditching his four children on Father’s Day to spend time with his Argentinian mistress.

More pointy cases: Ted Haggard. Larry Craig. John Ensign. Eliot Spitzer.

These are all smart people, who really should have gotten the message by now: If you did (or are still doing) Something Horrendous and you feel you must speak out against every other person who does it too, you should know that your opposition to Something Horrendous will make you a target and that your own participation in it will soon be made horribly, loudly, and immediately public, making you look like an ass.

A stupid ass, because it’s so obvious my middle-aged basset hound knows this. And pathetic attempts to cover up your transgressions (my current favorite is Ted Haggard’s assertion that he called the male prostitute to buy some meth, but threw it away) only make you look stupider and assier. Oh, what I would give for some busted politician to just nut up and say, “Yeah. I did it. I must really look stupid right about now,” when confronted with this nonsense.

Gratuitous stocking stuffer: the pastor said his wife had the affair, and he sometimes joined in. And sometimes the assistant’s wife showed up, too. In the pastor’s house (presumably subsidized to some extent by the parishioners). After Thursday Bible study, no less. And the whole sordid affair came to a crashing halt when a bunch of parishioners complained about the assistant having sex with *them.*

The math alone is staggering, when you consider all the possible permutations and the resulting tests for sexually-transmitted diseases.

And then we find the shiny new bicycle hiding behind the tree: Facebook doesn’t cause affairs. People cause affairs. Taking away technology isn’t going to fix that.

Some will argue, as this pastor did when he was able to haul himself out of his four-way, that we should avoid what Catholics call the ‘near occasion of sin.’ And if FB is a temptation, then we should avoid that. And I would say that it’s just common sense, and each individual needs to know what constitutes a ‘near occasion’ for themselves.

But the final answer isn’t to remove technology, or to burn down all the bars (which is where a lot of affairs started before the Internet). Not only is technology (or for that matter, bars) NOT a source of temptation for everyone, it can be a great life-saving, friend-finding knowledge enhancer.

The answer should be what it’s always been: strengthen your commitment to keeping your promises. Pay attention to the work of continuing to fall in love with your partner. Keep your eyes on the road.

And as my father will no doubt say: “We wouldn’t have all these problems if people could just keep their pants on.”

© E.S. Evans 2010