I’ve never been entirely clear on how Jeff Jacoby became a columnist for the Boston Globe, but in one important sense, I’m glad he’s there. Very few columnists for major dailies are as confused as Jacoby, and his odd, conservative perspectives make for good blog posts.
Jacoby’s latest is devoted to outgoing Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who I’ve been hoping to write less about. (Is there a 12-step program?) The subject is simple enough: hypocrisy. As Jacoby sees it, Craig’s bathroom behavior was “odious,” but just because he was virulently anti-gay as a lawmaker, while being gay in private, does not make him a hypocrite.
In the first place, opposing same-sex marriage doesn’t make someone a “foe of gay rights” or of gay people; redefining marriage is a controversial political issue on which reasonable people disagree.
But even if you do characterize Craig’s public record as one of hostility to gays and homosexual behavior, his behavior in the Minneapolis men’s room wasn’t hypocritical. It was squalid. It was degrading. Can anyone imagine that Craig was proud of what he was doing? Or that he was skulking around a public toilet trying to pick up strangers because he believed such behavior was unobjectionable? Surely the opposite was true – not that he approved of what he was doing, but that he disapproved, and hoped no one would find out.
A furtive surrender to temptation may indicate lust or stupidity or a failure of will, but it takes more than that to prove hypocrisy. The H-word gets thrown around with abandon these days, but generally what is meant by it is inconsistency – failing to live up to one’s words, falling short of the values one espouses.
After taking a few cheap and unnecessary shots at Barney Frank, Jacoby concludes that Craig’s “cruising” incident doesn’t constitute hypocrisy because the senator simply fell victim to a moral weakness.
I have no idea what Jacoby is talking about.
If Craig doesn’t qualify as a hypocrite, who does? Thankfully, Jacoby provides us with a definition.
Hypocrisy isn’t merely saying one thing but sometimes doing another. Nor is it simply having a double standard – lionizing Anita Hill, say, but trashing Paula Jones (or vice versa). Hypocrisy is worse than that. It’s a form of duplicity. A hypocrite is one who doesn’t believe the moral views he proclaims and violates them routinely in his own life.
So who is a hypocrite? The antidrug zealot who cheerfully tokes up with his friends. The “family-values” politician who blasts the sins of others while blithely carrying on affairs of his own. The public champion of women’s rights who privately treats women like dirt. The cleric who preaches chastity and abstinence, but is a serial pedophile behind closed doors.
I’m willing to go along with Jacoby’s definition of the word, but I’d argue it absolutely applies to Craig.
The senator has taken a far-right stance on issues of equality for a couple of decades. He touts “traditional family values” at every possible opportunity. He believes that gay people are second-class citizens, should be treated as such in matters of law, and has legislated accordingly. The record is consistent — on the Defense of Marriage Act, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, and an anti-gay constitutional amendment. Publicly and politically, Craig proclaimed a certain standard for moral values, and it is unambiguously conservative.
It stands in stark contrast with the behavior Craig is accused of engaging in. If an antidrug zealot who cheerfully tokes up with his friends is a hypocrite, why not an anti-gay zealot who believes gays are second-class citizens while soliciting men in bathrooms? If I’m reading Jacoby’s column correctly, the difference is the “cheerfully” part.
This is all very silly. One can label Craig a lot of things, but if “hypocrite” isn’t one of them, the word has no meaning.