GetReligion tried to find humor in the story of the Kerry campaign's unfortunate choice of a liaison to churches, so fair is fair: Joe Feuerherd of the National Catholic Reporter has written a devastating profile of Deal Hudson, editor of Crisis and the Bush campaign's newly resigned adviser on Catholic issues. Feuerherd reports on a trail of failed marriages in Hudson's life, and the most disturbing allegations -- about sexual involvement with a first-year student at Fordham University -- follow Hudson's conversion to Catholicism.
Possibly the most pertinent quote in the profile is what Hudson said after he took on Ono Ekeh, host of a "Catholics for Kerry" website, who lost his job at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for African American Catholics: "If you're going to play in the sandbox, then you have to take the consequences of your public utterances and your public actions."
Sometimes those consequences come at the hands of a reporter who knows how to follow the scent of a story.