Not long ago, the executive director of Boys Town USA, Fr. Val J. Peter, felt compelled to write a letter to the boys and girls in his charge about the recent goings-on in Washington. "If you are old enough to know about these matters," Fr. Peter wrote, "then surely you are old enough to learn some lessons from them." The letter is a remarkable distillation of what is, and always has been, at stake in the Lewinsky scandal, and it's worth quoting at some length.
"The main lesson is about lying. Everybody -- and I mean everybody -- can see that the President lied over and over again, and then lied to cover up the lying. Lying did not help him. It made things worse for him . . . much worse. If you lie, it will make things worse for you, too. . . . How is lying made worse? The bigger the role model, the worse the lie. If someone I hardly know lies to me, it is bad. But it is much worse if my mother lies to me. She is a much bigger role model in my life. That makes the lie worse.
"That's why the President falls off a mountain when he lies. Yes, he falls a great distance. And if he lies over and over again, he falls an even greater distance. You may say if we raise the bar too high, no one will run for public office. Then all we will get is the biggest bully or the guy with the most money. That's really not our problem. The problem is just the opposite.
"We need to raise the bar high enough so that better people will run for office. We need to restore the expectation that includes honest behavior. The solution is not to take the bar away. To put it another way, if many people are lying, the solution is not to approve of lying, but rather to rekindle the fires of devotion. Otherwise, human flourishing is diminished."
Spencer Tracy couldn't have put it better.