By Susan D. Harris

Welcome to the first installment of my new column — “So Let Me Get This Straight” — a  short and sweet commentary on any given current event…to be interspersed between more “serious” articles. 

Worse than finding out that Canadian-based, extra-marital cheating website Ashley Madison had been hacked, was learning that nearly 40 million people had registered — and paid — to engage in clandestine, adulterous, sexual hook-ups.

This really brings one to a “What Would Jesus Do?” moment; while simultaneously striking a pose of Rodin’s Le Penseur.

It’s a disgusting day for Western democracy when courts are put in the position of defending immoral activity by going after the illegal hackers that exposed it. (By the way, that’s the same immoral activity that many U.S. state courts consider legal grounds for a “fault divorce.”) But then again, after the “shining city on a hill” was lit up like a rainbow to celebrate the abomination of “a man lying with a man as with a woman,” we should have assumed traditional Western values were all headed for the same toilet.

Forty million people:  Women looking for women, men looking for men, many posting their limits as “anything goes.” Beat me, tar and feather me, nail me to the wall…but please give me an orgasm…some way…any way. God help us.

Adding to the allure of the website was the “ooh I’m doing something bad in secret” factor. You know — those people who derive extra satisfaction from the fact that they’re doing something wrong in the eyes of society. The people who have no comprehension of an omnipotent God who doesn’t need a computer to track their IP address, or a cookie to compile their browsing history. That nasty old God who saw them naked and afraid when they came from their mother’s womb; and will still see them naked and afraid the moment before they pass from this mortal life.

The very same God who, without his original objection, no one would be able to have the satisfaction of that extra titillation of “doing wrong” to begin with.

Ironic isn’t it?

Going after the hackers-who-went-after-the-adulterers reminds me of the story of a Wyoming woman who was charged with robbing her neighbors after she found out they were hoarding a nice stash from an armed robbery they’d previously committed.

While Sir Walter Scott’s famous quote from Marmion is unquestionably most aptly applied to the life and times of Bill and Hillary Clinton; it begs quoting in light of the Ashley Madison “scandal-within-a-scandal”:

“O, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive!”

Appearing on BarbWire.com and Renew America