Take all the medals away, lay bare the fallen warrior's chest. Put a new medal there: For Valor in the War of Sex. Add the general's corpse to the endless pile our hypocrisy and denial generates: Tiger Woods, Larry Craig, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Gary Hart, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and all the rest.

We get it completely backward, of course. We are willing to forgive — Clinton still survives, the "Big Dog," emphasis on dog, too big to kill, and Republicans have forgiven even David Vitter for his love of prostitutes. God Himself has forgiven Newt Gingrich, says Newt Gingrich. After we destroy, we are downright smug in our forgiveness and quickly proceed to clucking over how cruel we have been, how silly it all is. They have been punished enough, we say — it was a psychological weakness, a momentary fall from grace.

But there was never anything to forgive, for this immature and prim purification ritual is the only unforgivable thing.

I want to suggest that sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that sex itself is the moment of grace. And that our sterile idea of perfection is the actual sin. To start with the subject on the table, adultery is a brave rebellion against the invisible prison we build for ourselves. When the sad little man Larry Craig widened his stance in that airport bathroom, it was probably the most honest and courageous act of his life. When Clinton got that blowjob in the White House, he wasn't indulging a weakness (and an eager intern) but enacting the hero's journey of reconciling inner and outer, risking all to break through the wall of hypocritical purity he had spent years building and projecting to the world in the effort to get elected. By risking martyrdom, in fact, he lifted himself up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand. He was the Martyred Jesus of Oral Sex with Interns and all we see is a mean little sin, as all the sexual deviates pretending to be puritans gathered around in an orgy of denunciation and scandal. In our condemnation, we focus on the supposedly broken vows and the supposed pain of his wife when in fact we know nothing of his wife's true feelings or her knowledge and tolerance of his "frisky" side (frisky being one of the endless array of demeaning expressions we use as invisible prison bars, along with dog and pig and you only want one thing). We never consider that our reaction is the punishment and the meanness is all in our eyes. Every single time we play out this ritual, we replay the Old Testament rite in which the pious transferred their sins to goats, which were then driven into the wilderness, just as we drive David Petraeus and a parade of other scapegoats out the gates of our smug little village of lies in the hope that we can put the "sin" outside the gate — when it is, of course, always inside. That's what happens when you put up gates........