Randy Cohen, the NYT ethicist, tackled the outing of elected officials in this Sunday’s edition: “My guideline is this: the more aggressively, the more centrally, an official participates in a policy struggle, the more reasonable it is to out him. A counterargument could be made in defense of hypocrisy, or at least for its irrelevance: a policy should stand on its merits, not on its advocates’ behavior.”