Writing Tools

We interrupt this news program for a message on behalf of hypocrisy.

Hypocrites are all the rage these days, from a conservative senator arrested in a men’s room, to pro-family presidential candidates with messed-up marriages and families, to even Mother Teresa, who had the temerity, as she kowtowed to the dying, to proclaim in a private letter doubts about her own faith.

There was a time when journalists published almost nothing about the private lives of public figures, such as Babe Ruth or John F. Kennedy (a couple of real hypocrites by today's crazy standards), followed by a time when they published almost anything they wanted to. It became easy to run people’s dirty laundry up the flagpole. We’d simply wrap ourselves in the First Amendment and evoke the people’s right to know.

That's not enough anymore. Now we have the hypocrisy defense. Puritans on the left and the right and opportunists in the press now justify revelations of private behavior if such behavior fails to square with a person’s public pronouncements. By that standard, we are all hypocrites.

I looked up the word, which comes from the world of the ancient Greek theater. A hypocrite is an actor, a person who plays a part. (Does that make Ronald Reagan a hypocrite?)

I’m a hypocrite. You’re a hypocrite. We are all hypocrites. Why? Because I violate in my private life some of the things I profess in public. I guess it makes me a hypocrite because I take public actions designed to encourage my children, my students, my colleagues, and my readers to be a little better than I am. I don’t always practice what I preach.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical politician, say a 50-year-old woman, who votes in favor of adding restrictions to abortions. And imagine you are a journalist receiving evidence in the mail that this woman had an abortion some 30 years ago. I can see the gas bags fulminating for weeks over such a woman. Is she a hypocrite? Maybe. Does this seeming contradiction between private behavior and public pronouncement require the journalist to publish? I say no.

I say that the relationship between private morality and public behavior has been grossly overstated by the evangelical right, by the secular left, and, for its own purposes, by the news media.

When Sen. Larry Craig, (R-Idaho) is arrested for lewd conduct in an airport restroom, when he enters a plea of guilty, when he holds a press conference declaring his heterosexual innocence, he has made choices and taken action that require public scrutiny and extensive news coverage. But what if his homosexual activities or his adultery had been committed in private, but leaked to the press? Does his so-called hypocrisy make publication inevitable? Again, I say no.

And here’s why. Let’s say Senator X is a private homosexual. His feelings and urges contradict his moral beliefs, so he hates himself for being the way he is, especially on those occasions when he engages in anonymous sex with consenting adults during his travels. In public, he opposes gay marriage or certain anti-discrimination laws. Isn’t a homosexual allowed to believe that homosexuality is wrong? That may be self-loathing or intolerance, but it’s not hypocrisy.

Please save us all from the sanctimony of a Mitt Romney, who said of Craig: “Once again, we’ve found people in Washington have not lived up to the level of respect and dignity that we would expect from somebody that gets elected to a position of high influence. Very disappointing.”

I  suspect that all the candidates running for president have engaged in sexual acts that if revealed to the public would make them unelectable. I know I have.

A comforting bit of Catholic theology has influenced my feelings about hypocrisy. It goes something like this (I’ll spare you the Latin): that the power of a sacrament derives from the action taken by the minister, and not from the minister’s spiritual condition. In other words, if I take communion from a priest who has abused a thousand children, I receive the same benefits as if I had taken it from Jesus himself. Whew. Thank God. By that reasoning, a legislator who has made horrible choices in his personal life could still be a good lawmaker.

Judged by personal morality, there’s a good chance that Richard Nixon may have been a more faithful husband and loving father than John Kennedy. It did not make him a better president. During the Civil Rights movement, the F.B.I. approached Gene Patterson, then the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, with information about the marital infidelities of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On two occasions, Patterson showed the agent the door, even after that agent gave the editor the easiest reason in the world to report a scandal: Can’t you see that this so-called preacher is a hypocrite?

I’ll take my stand with Dr. King, Mother Teresa, and all such hypocrites.