The American public has a new hobby — cheering the downfall of gay Republican politicians. I’ve heard some people call it ironic. Really, it’s just disgusting.

The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer produce a mediocre Sunday paper with a mediocre reputation, which it earned anew by placing Carol M. Ostrom’s smug article “What sex scandals say about politics” on the front page of its Nov. 4 edition.

The “sex scandals” are those surrounding Republican lawmakers Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, famous after 33 years in public service for his restroom foot-tapping, and state Rep. Richard Curtis of Washington, who resigned Oct. 31 after being caught paying off a gay prostitute.

The article proposed to answer the crude question, “What’s going on when politicians risk everything for a quickie?” The answer, we’re supposed to believe, is that politicians have a “higher threshold for risk” and therefore are willing to stake their lives on their groins’ random impulses.

Only in passing did Ostrom wonder, “Is the power of a closeted sex drive so powerful that it can’t be resisted for long?”

That question answers itself. Every post-pubescent human creature knows the power of the sex drive — not to mention the drives for companionship, for affection, for (dare I say it?) love.

Pseudo-psychiatric piffle like this is, unfortunately, the lifeblood of the sensationalist media. But something else has disturbed me lately: the malign delectation with which many people on my side of the aisle have savored the outing of gay conservatives.

(Don’t bother me with the argument that it’s these men’s alleged crimes and not their homosexuality that are the source of their misery. I defy anyone to tell me that Craig’s case would have gone past the arraignment stage had he been any other man, or that Curtis would have received national attention if he’d patronized a female prostitute.)

Just a little more than a year ago on the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher, I heard the openly gay Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts defend his egregious practice of outing gay Republicans.

“I believe there’s a right to privacy, but that doesn’t mean there’s a right to hypocrisy,” Frank said.

Nonsense. It means precisely that. Why else would the right to privacy be so immensely valuable?

We have the right to an outward social face and to a private existence, one that escapes the glower of the infinitely pious public. We have a right to all of the little hypocrisies we please, so long as they harm no one else.

It’s this tiny sphere of hidden happiness, especially in today’s climate of cheap Puritanism, that makes life worth living.

In any case, “hypocrite” is the worst word we could use to describe Craig and Curtis. A hypocrite denounces the sins of others while engaging in those sins him- or herself.

But exactly which sins are involved here? To call these men’s acts hypocrisy is to subtly adopt the ridiculous, pernicious view that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice and that gay sex is a vice. The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) instructor who sniffs glue while the kids aren’t looking is a hypocrite. The anti-corruption crusader on the take is a hypocrite.

Incidentally, liberals who criticize conservative intolerance and then proceed to turn anti-gay fury on their political enemies are hypocrites.

Craig and Curtis are merely men at war with their own natures. They believe that it’s wrong to be the people they were born to be, but that conflict is none of our concern. Their stances on gay rights are abominable; that’s all that we can rightly say.

Dragging their inner demons into the limelight hasn’t disproved their views. All it has done is maliciously wreck the lives of two people who never hurt anyone.

By partaking in these periodic field trips to the guillotine of the Christian right, liberals aren’t taking a stand against religious bigotry and bullying. They’re feeding and legitimating it.

“Religious bigotry and bullying” is the real problem here — as well as the reason the right to privacy is so important.

Neither Craig nor Curtis, I suspect, enjoy living contrived lives or taking risks with their careers and families, as the Ostrom article stupidly suggested. They aren’t doing it for a damned “quickie.”

They do it because the Bible tells them — and their constituents — that they must. If you want a root cause of all this deception and all these hysterics, there it is.

I’ve intentionally waited until the frenzy surrounding these events has died down to comment on them so as not to help plumb the public’s creepy appetite for humiliation. I offer this column as a plea for reticence next time — because it won’t be long before we’re all once again subjected to this fetid chorus of sanctimony: homophobic witch hunters calling for rolling heads, partisan liberals shrieking in vindictive delight, lazy media popinjays indulging in amateur psychoanalysis.

It’s revolting, but it’s the new national pastime.

[Reach columnist Chris Kaasa at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]