Duggar and Cheater Shaming

I pretty much agree with everything about Amanda Marcotte’s discussion of the Ashley Madison hack and Josh Duggar. Like her, I felt really icky about the whole thing since, while it’s not easy to feel bad for people who cheat on their partners, why should this be public information? It should not. On the other hand, there’s Josh Duggar and for him, it’s totally different.

But cheating is about violating a deeply personal agreement between two people. If the person you’re with doesn’t care if you sleep with other people, it’s not cheating. It’s all about an agreement that you decide between yourselves, and like all such agreements, the only people who should care what you do are people who your behavior directly affects. It’s not the business of the world at large.

Unless you’re Josh Duggar, of course. Or anyone else who fights publicly to use government interference to mess with the private sexual choices of consenting adults. If you fight for the government to limit or ban gay people’s marriages or women’s reproductive choices, then your sex life is our business. If only there were a way to do a targeted search of Ashley Madison data for that, while leaving everyone else alone.