Hence, when Bill Clinton’s infidelity started coming to light, it made irresistible sense for conservatives to paint him as living proof of liberalism’s moral bankruptcy. Early in Clinton’s presidency, a few GOP leaders had worried about appearing inconsistent. “Republicans who were screaming about Anita Hill are hardly in a position to turn now and run around brandishing Paula Jones,” Newt Gingrich told his colleagues in 1994. But when the Monica Lewinsky scandal rolled around, Gingrich happily threw in his lot with the impeachers. Ultimately, Gingrich suffered more than Clinton, at least politically: in 1998, he had to give up his speakership, with his own extramarital affair looming offstage, even as he was putting the president in the dock. Other GOP leaders, too, came to grief for their infidelities, the remorseless logic of sexual exposure sparing its advocates no more than its intended targets. Clinton, meanwhile, rebounded to exit the White House with the highest public-opinion ratings of any departing president since Gallup began keeping track.

Today’s scandal-a-month journalism has clearly gotten out of control. Rationalizations abound, many of them quite rickety, for tilting the balance between privacy and exposure ever further from the former and closer to the latter. In some cases, such as that of John Edwards, journalists justify a story’s importance through exquisitely circular reasoning: any politician who would engage in outré or risky sexual activities, it is said, deserves to be outed and punished, because he lacks good judgment—since everyone knows that in our current media environment his behavior will eventually explode into a debilitating scandal. Other times, scandal coverage is defended as a “press story,” with media critics using the question of whether the story ought to be covered as an excuse to cover it. And for decades now, the granddaddy of all rationalizations has been the “character” issue that was born of Vietnam and Watergate and became ubiquitous after Gary Hart.

Still more problematic have been the cases where the news coverage has run ahead of the evidence. Although Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose name is connected to other alleged rapes and sexually predatory deeds, may not deserve sympathy, he was nonetheless all but convicted in the press, before complicating details about his infamous hotel-room liaison were revealed. In the past two presidential elections, two leading candidates were said or insinuated to have been adulterers—John Kerry in multiple newspapers in 2004 and John McCain in The New York Times in 2008—without corroboration.

But complaining about media coverage is pointless; frenzies over sex scandals won’t abate unless the public appetite for them diminishes. Despite appearances, that can happen, at least regarding some forms of sexual behavior. Just as divorce no longer causes a stir, the evolving discourse over exposing gay public officials suggests that homosexuality, too, is exiting the realm of scandal. During the 1990s, radical gay activists made a point of outing gay conservative congressmen, finding justification in the congressmen’s hypocrisy in voting against gay rights. The mainstream media largely ignored those efforts. When a 1989 Republican whispering campaign calling Democratic Speaker Tom Foley gay became too loud to ignore, it was denounced in the press as a “smear.” More recently, though, as being gay has lost much of its stigma, the media have begun outing gay politicians under limited conditions, with the implicit message that their sexuality is no longer controversial in and of itself. For some time, rumors had circulated that Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and Jim McGreevey were gay, without those rumors’ seeing print. But once news organizations had a legitimate pretext for pulling back the curtain—charges that Mark Foley had harassed an underage House page, that McGreevey had put a lover on the state payroll, and that Craig had solicited sex in an airport restroom—they did so. Last year, when Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was falsely suspected of being gay, some journalists called for her to reveal more about her sex life, arguing that her alleged lesbianism was not scandalous but rather completely unremarkable. On this issue, at least, the balance between a public figure’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know is being recalibrated.