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I had no particular interest in rubbernecking this Mark Sanford disaster. People make mistakes. The flesh is weak, the heart disobedient and marriages hard. According to the General Social Survey, about 10 percent of married people admit that they have cheated on their spouses…
At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing while doing another.
There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot…
And this kind of hypocrisy isn’t confined to the politicians. It permeates the electorate. While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.
Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates.
And, a study titled “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” that was conducted by Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor of business at Harvard Business School and published earlier this year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that subscriptions to online pornography sites were “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality” and in states where “more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’ ”
They could avoid this hypocrisy by focusing more on what happens in their own bedrooms and avoiding the trap of judging what goes on in everyone else’s.
So, who actually invented hypocrisy? Republicans or Christians?
I’ve never cheated on my partner.
On others’ partners sure, but not mine…
I find it delightful that the same conservatives who repeatedly chastised Clinton for his moral failings are now saying they never cared what a politician does in private.
Hypocrisy truly is a special talent of the right wing. They wouldn’t have a platform without it.
What I find bizarre is that hypocrisy seems to be a term used only about sex…when in fact Dems are guilty of it at a stunning level.
There was a “fierce moral urgency” to get rid of the “totalitarian Patriot Act” and reign in the “fascist unwarranted searches and surveillance” that Bush put in…until they are in power, and these things become useful and are being expanded. Now, not a peep.
Hypocrites.
Women’s rights are important until Bush started talking about fighting the Taliban, at which time they became “non-western cultural traditions that must be understood and respected”.
Hypocrites.
Freedom of speech is utterly vital to our freedom when it’s Ward Churchill, but when someone dares ask an unscripted question of a candidate in the midst of the campaign, his act of free speech gets him investigated by state tax authorities and his personal information released to the press by Obama toadies.
Hypocrites.
Bush was “in the pocket of the Saudis”, but when it became obvious that Obama was just as obsequious and had just as many staffers and advisors with oily hands, that no longer matters.
Hypocrites.
The rich and powerful must “pay their share” and not whine about taxes, until it becomes clear that hardly anyone Obama knows actually pays taxes, and they get off without fines or penalties for crimes that would land ordinary proles in the slammer.
Hypocrites.
Hypocrisy a rightwing phenomenon? I think not.
But I’m not enough of a partisan retard to call hypocrisy (or any common human failing) the exclusive province of the Left. Dvorak, on the other hand, seems to think it’s a perfectly normal thing to do.
Adam is increasingly looking like the sane one in this doltish duo.
Umm…
Eidard posted this. Dvorak has not made a single comment in the article as of this posting. Eidard, several people have answered your question appropriately (Hypocrisy has been around since the fruit [or since language, depending on your belief]). I’ll just point out in passing that your question is a false dichotomy.
Sorry Eideard, just noticed the typo.
Liberals are incapable of hypocrisy because they believe in nothing, value nothing, and advocate nothing other than attack those that do have have a moral compass to guide their lives. Their moral and cultural relativism lead them to admire Mao as much as Lincoln.They claim intellectual superiority for such a feat but in the end it is only a thin cover to justify a selfish hedonism that has been this generations calling card for 50 years.
Liberals are incapable of “hypocrisy” because they believe in nothing, value nothing, and advocate nothing other than attack those that do have have a moral compass to guide their lives. Their moral and cultural relativism lead them to admire Mao as much as Lincoln.They claim intellectual superiority for such a feat but in the end it is only a thin cover to justify a selfish hedonism that has been this groups calling card for 90 years.
Peggasus — Yes, Democrats are selfish and Republicans are altruists. Everybody knows that!
@Nimby: Sorry, there’s no such thing as party registration in the state of Texas. Voting in a primary identifies you so you can’t vote in both primaries. I’m betting that you voted in the Democratic primary for Hillary, per Limbaugh’s instructions.
Hypocrisy started when we humans learned the trick of self-consciousness. See Julian Jaynes’ work. Abstract thinking and the ability to imagine and consider options is a relatively new development. Religions with icons were founded before conscious thought: Followers believed that the statues/idols *were* the gods. When we developed higher consciousness, the gods went to the sky because it became obvious that the statues were just statues.
Also enabled with this development: Deception.
For an excellent example, look into the Spanish conquest of the Incas, which took about a day. For example, the Incas had not developed the advanced thinking and had no concept of theft: When you weren’t at home, you advertised this because there was no burglary.
#27, pegleg,
Their moral and cultural relativism lead them to admire Mao as much as Lincoln.
Is this what Boss Limpdick has been ranting lately? Geeze, no wonder the right wing nuts are screwed up.