I saw this piece in Slate defending Governor Mark Sanford as a human being linked from Balloon Juice, which I read semi-regularly and like quite a bit, and I have to say, I really disagree with the premise:

I’m not offering Sanford’s humanity as an excuse. I’m just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford’s human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he’s caused, the hypocrisies he’s engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.

Sanford’s fumbling efforts to explain how he’s tried to rescue himself with his faith offered some people an opportunity to make fun of his religion, as if a confused, lost, flawed person were the right spokesman for anything. People tend to think the most awful thing about a person is the most true thing. They also apparently think it’s the most true thing about his or her associations. So an e-mail arrived asking, “[I]s there any Republican not sleeping around?” Maybe Sanford should have been a presidential candidate. He apparently represents an entire party and an entire religion.

What Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say is that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world. Yet in the constant flow of abuse, joke-making, and grand conclusions about his failings, it seemed everyone having a good time pointing at his self-indulgence was also engaging in a form of it.

(Emphasis mine.)

You have got to be kidding me, seriously. Mocking a man who governs on the basis of staunch conservativism and then secretly abandons his job, family and state to slip across a hemisphere and bang his mistress is somehow equivalent to that man’s hypocrisy? Even slightly?

Give me a break. Mark Sanford is the butt of a lot of jokes because he has destroyed himself in truly epic, hilarious fashion. This is a man who fought to deny gay people basic civil rights, like marriage, then destroyed his own marriage through a profound betrayal of not just his family, but the voters of the state of South Carolina as well. The man disappeared without telling his staff, without transferring his authority, leaving the state in a power vacuum and ungovernable, let alone accountable to its own people. Sanford tried to block the Obama stimulus money from going to help the citizens of his own state, then wasted untold taxpayer dollars by collecting a salary while he banged his mistress on another CONTINENT. His staff, his security detail, the entire executive branch of the state sat on their hands, burning cash, so that he could diddle someone in Argentina. The sheer, incredible, disgusting depth of his hypocrisy will either make you laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh, and I don’t think that makes me a bad person.

As for mocking his religion, why not? This is a man who wears his faith on his sleeve, has for some time, and now he’s claiming it can… rescue him from himself? That’s great Mark, really. Why couldn’t it do so last week? Last month? Clearly there’s an effectiveness issue here.   In the conference he says he’s been working with this spiritual advisor of his on this issue for five months.  Really?  After five months, ‘Don’t keep cheating on your wife’ or ‘Don’t abandon all your adult responsibilities for a fuck on the side’ never came up, specifically, during this counseling?  I could do a better job advising Sanford than this ‘spiritual giant’ in five minutes, without a bronze age tome to guide me either.

As for using Sanford to mock the Republican Party… why not? There IS a serious and obvious crisis of basic human decency in a party run by, let’s see: Sanford (until just now, head of the Republican Governor’s Association), Rush Limbaugh (drug abusing, racist misogynist pig), Dick Cheney (pro-torture ideologue) and Sarah Palin (Governor who uses state resources to settle family disputes, serial liar and ethics violator).

Why not ask if there’s an issue with powerful Republicans and marital ethics? Newt Gingrich famously divorced his wife while she was dying of cancer. Giuliani divorced his by PRESS conference. John McCain divorced his first long-suffering wife to marry a younger woman, who he was running around with before the divorce. Sanford is… well, he’s an obvious example now.   Larry Craig, as we all  know, LOVES his wife.  Just last week another prominent Republican, Ensign, was caught having an affair. Their party is the party that seeks to decide who is, and is not, fit to marry another human being, and yet they are up to their eyeballs in adulterers. I think it’s perfectly valid to ask if their obsession with marriage stems from their seeming inability to have decent adult relationships.

So yes, Sanford is a human being.  I don’t recall anyone saying otherwise.  He is also a liar, a hypocrite and a fraud, an immoral sideshow attraction who denies other people their basic human rights and dignity.  It is only right and proper that his self-immolation brings some satisfaction to the rest of the species.   Consider it moral education mixed with comedy.