March of the Hypocrites

Yet another top-ranking Guardian of Morality has lined up to confess and acknowledge the peculiar potency of that little area of biped anatomy just below the equator. Yes, Disappearing Mark Sanford turns out to have one just like the rest of us but to be less well endowed in the North Pole region where the brains are located.

Why are these guys so predictable? How many of these hilarious but ultimately depressing episodes do we have to live through before getting a life as a country and bouncing the sexophobic religious fanatics out of serious public debate? Is it not ironic that we cheer loudly for the demise of the Iranian mullahs while simultaneously failing to notice that their approach to gender equity and sexual emancipation is not that far from that of Governor Sanford and his pious crew?

I have no doubt that, in private, the robed Robespierres of Teheran are as randy and self-indulgent as a half-ton of Republican anti-abortionists. And Doug Ireland has reported in Gay City News on the nightmare of persecution, arrest, torture and sometimes death faced by Iranian gays—who also relate with depressing consistency that the repressive apparatus is full of perverted closet cases, who can’t wait to force themselves on the detainees in the country’s jails and prisons.

But commentators who wonder how on earth the religious right can sustain their ongoing hypocritical positions about sex, such as Salon’s Glenallen Walken commenting on the last wandering weenie (Senator Ensign), continue to miss the point. We asked ourselves the same thing for years in Chile as the pinochetista parties fought the legalization of divorce year after year despite their own second and third marriages. (They could get annulments for a price.)

How can they shamelessly do one thing and preach another? we marveled. But that was exactly the point. Individual behavior, in their parallel universe, was not important, and in fact merely confirmed the fallen state of sinful (sexual) man (or less forgivingly, woman). As long as these politicians defended the idea and the strict legal fulfillment of traditional standards of chastity, fidelity and all the rest, it didn’t matter whether they slipped up personally now and then. They were almost expected to.

The National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez expresses this approach perfectly in her we-forgive-you column that I saw Tuesday in the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American. ‘A politician’s failings do not render all to which he subscribes morally null’, she writes and adds, ‘Preaching comes from sinners, too’. How convenient.

Of course, this approach would be laughed into scorn if the roles were reversed and we were back observing the foibles of an Edwards or a Clinton. In those cases the guilty are to chased by Furies into the bowels of hell and have red ‘A’s woven into their undershirts throughout eternity.

But there has to come a point where the ‘we’re-just-human-but-you-guys-are-evil’ routine wears itself out. I hope I live long enough to witness the triumph of Iranian women over the bearded skirts now in charge and to see the American right wing immediately side with the opposition and align itself with the ousted clerics. Then they can go back to chanting ‘Bomb-bomb-Iran’ with gusto.