Hmmm, no, not quite what I'm saying, and obtaining accurate info to provide a fair trial 20 years later is rather difficult, both due to evidence and changing values. You can't get a "trial of your peers" 20 years later because we've moved on - sometimes favoring the accused, sometimes against. Hastert is a creep, but in the age before Sinead tore up the picture of the Pope to protest coverup of priest pedophiles, hardly the only one. We just found a convenient tangential way to punish him retroactively, unlike most of the others.

The the $3.5 million extortion or remedy on top of the sentencing is a type of double punishment, as is his giving up his public position (I think) due to concerns about exposure. That it was illegal acts rather than Clinton's legal affair changes it a bit - but what if Monica asked for $3.5 million to keep quiet? Would it make a difference whether she was his subordinate at the time or not?  Samantha Geimer won her payout settlement through the courts, though obviously the whole idea for the molested boy was for it *not* to be known.

And I've much less sympathy for Jerry Sandusky, who was abusing boys far into the age of gay rights and even gay marriage.

I would also distinguish acts that involve violence, ones that involve penetration and those that are more coercive & exploitive but less intrusive and traumatizing. Others might disagree - I don't know what the law says in different locales. Oklahoma just ruled that snatching a bit of oral sex from a stone comatose drunk 16-year-old girl is okay. I also have a feeling they'd find a way to make the law work if it were a 16-year-old boy. And then a couple who are found having sex in a car wind up on the 'sex offenders" list with rapists, pedophiles and what-have-you.

And living in Europe with less conservative attitudes towards sex around also affects my feelings here.

Hope that clarifies.