"Family Values" duplicity

Mark Souder and Tracey Jackson facilely taped a video extolling abstinence-only sex education, while secretly having their own sexual affair. They were preaching a rule of behavior to kids that they were actively violating at the time.

This is the epitome of the duplicity and hypocrisy that is so often played out in scandals of the self-righteous religious right. Dr. George Rekers is the other latest example -- being the anti-gay crusader while taking off on a 10 day vacation with his rented rentboy.

Here is a suggestion that part of the explanation may be that the system itself is often built up on hypocrisy.

Carolyn Howard Merritt, a Presbyterian pastor and author, writes in a HuffPost essay about her introduction to such thinking as a young student at a bible college. Her fellow women students were all daughters of prominent conservative preachers who had come to college to find conservative preacher husbands. The school had strict rules about proper behavior and dress code (no bikinis). The big issues were pro-life, pro-abstinence, and anti-gay.

Sneaking out of the dorm one day to go to the beach with these young women, the author was struck that, underneath their outer clothes, they all were wearing the forbidden bikinis. While sunning themselves on the beach, talk turned to abortions. Back at school they spouted the party line equating abortion with murder. But lying there on the beach, each one confessed that, if she got pregnant, she wouldn't think twice about secretly having an abortion. One said, "If I got pregnant, it would ruin my father's career."

Merritt, already a budding feminist at the time, says:

It didn't bother me that one of the women would get an abortion. What concerned me was that she would have an abortion for her family, in order to keep up the appearance of abstinence. She would have it to protect her pro-life father. . . . As women, we were the sexual gatekeepers: we were to wear the purity ring and keep vigilant in fighting off men. We were told that masturbating was a sin, and that Joycelyn Elders was a purveyor of evil. If we had sex, we were tainted and immoral. We believed in abstinence, so securing contraceptive pills or buying condoms was like premeditated sin. And now, was it understood that if we became pregnant, we were to quietly get an abortion in order to protect our father's job?

This is the problem. It's the appearance of piety or abstinence that is paramount. So much of the "family values" movement is adherence to rules -- someone else's rules -- without having developed one's own code of morality. It's even worse when a politician adopts the "values" mantra for political expedience without even superficially believing what he espouses. Ergo, we get these frequent "surprising" scandals that expose the duplicity. When it's the appearance of family values that counts, rather than owning those values through internalizing and integrating them, then the important thing becomes merely not getting caught.

So they take chances, blithely doing the forbidden, and denying the risk of getting caught -- until they get caught. We call it hypocrisy. Often, I think, it's a complex psychological state that includes rebellion against an imposed set of rules, an underdeveloped and unintegrated personal moral code, denial of risk and of the effects on others, and dissociating the behavior pattern (that's not really me who's doing this) and rationalization of the actions (I deserve to be happy because my wife/husband doesn't give me what I need).

Call it what you will, explain it this way and that. One thing is true: it isn't pretty but it happens so frequently with such regularity that we're becoming inured to it. I'm no longer surprised. I just enjoy the schadenfreud of seeing the self-righteous get skewered on their own skewers.

Ralph