In my latest column I try to tackle a peeve of mine going back at least as far as the Clinton scandals: The way issues of character, morality, and public trust get reduced down to narrow criminal questions, and once that happens, equivalencies are drawn between legal infractions.
By way of illustration, it’s sort of like debates over free-speech restrictions. College student A shouts the n-word, college student B shouts “Three Cheers for Capitalism!” If a university punished them both for their outbursts, from a civil-libertarian perspective, you could argue it’s all a free-speech issue. But it’s not just a free-speech issue. How we judge the individuals — and by extension the punishments — should be informed by the content and intent of what they said. As a legal matter you can argue that they should be treated the same, but as a moral or political matter they are very different.
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