gracchusdixit

Several days ago, the Republican Governor of the great State of Alabama called a press conference to apologize, both to the people of his state and to his family, for having said things that he characterized as a “mistake.”  The statements he was referring to came during a cell phone call with one of his senior aides, a married woman 30 years his junior.

The call was recorded surreptitiously by a member of the governor’s family—we still don’t know who exactly—and was, to put it mildly, “intimate.”  Although the governor denies having had a physical relationship with his aide, the content of the call was so explicitly lascivious that scarcely anyone is prepared to take him at his word.  It would appear that his wife is one of those who does not.  Shortly before the press conference, she filed for divorce, ending their marriage of fifty years.

It would be tempting to dismiss this sordid business as a sad and rather pathetic aberration—except for the fact that Republican politicians seem to get themselves into this kind of unseemly hot water routinely.

There was Herman Cain, whose brief moment in the sun as a prospective Republican Presidential nominee evaporated when it was revealed that he had sexually harassed female employees for decades.

There was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, who, having led the fight to impeach Bill Clinton, was ultimately forced to confess that he was himself an adulterer.

There was Mark Foley, a one-time Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida, who was compelled to resign after it was revealed that he had a rather unsavory fondness for the young “pages” who serve that body.

There was Larry Craig, a long-serving Senator from Idaho and a stalwart champion of every conservative cause you can imagine, who was arrested and tried for propositioning a young man in a public restroom.  He pled guilty.

The litany of salacious misbehavior by Republican politicians could be extended indefinitely.

If history is any guide, however, Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama is likely to come out of this latest scandal intact, forgiven by his constituents and quite possibly enriched by the notoriety.

For all his peccadilloes, it didn’t take Herman Cain very long to pick up a lucrative contract with Fox News Channel.  New Gingrich’s infidelity didn’t stop big-money donors from bankrolling his Presidential prospects.  Mark Foley returned to Palm Beach, where he now hosts a radio talk show about (you guessed it) conservative politics.  And Larry Craig was not only forgiven by the people of Idaho but inducted into the Idaho Hall of Fame—though, under the circumstances, “Hall of Infamy” might be the more appropriate phrase.

It scarcely needs saying that infamous and lubricious behavior is not limited to Republicans.  John F. Kennedy was a legendary womanizer.  John Edwards had the audacity to think that he could run for President while concealing not only an adulterous affair but a child born out of wedlock.  Gary Hart was well on his way to becoming President until he was photographed with Donna Rice sitting on his lap.  Topping all that was the mother lode of Democratic improprieties: Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, snuggled in that closet in the Oval Office.

Although infidelity and lust would appear to be equally—one might almost say, democratically—distributed across the political spectrum, there is one important difference between the two ends of the spectrum.

For all their tawdry behavior, Democrats do not customarily combine personal impropriety with public sanctimony.  Republicans, on the other hand, have made the sanctimonious and hypocritical condemnation of other human beings one of the governing principles of their party.

Robert Bentley of Alabama is a picture-perfect illustration of the phenomenon.   As a deacon of the Baptist Church, he has displayed a fondness for preaching to anyone who will listen about his “salvation through Jesus Christ.”  Indeed, he ran for governor on an explicit platform of Christian “family values,” vowing to prohibit civil unions, denouncing gay marriage as a “social experiment,” opposing abortion under almost all circumstances.  Governor Bentley’s loudly proclaimed Christianity has not stopped him from imposing the harshest anti-immigration law in the nation, drastically curtailing voting rights, and, despite his admission that Alabama is one of the poorest states in the nation, refusing to expand Medicaid, because it might encourage “dependency.”  For this septuagenerian governor and Baptist deacon to have been caught on tape having phone sex with another man’s wife is more than ironic.  It qualifies as an act of divine retribution.

Yet Bentley’s stupendous hypocrisy is in no way exceptional.

The aforementioned Herman Cain not only gave us a stupendously stupid plan for taxing everybody and everything at the same nonsensical flat rate, the short-lived “9-9-9,” he also lectured the nation on the sanctity of traditional marriage—all the while he was cheating on his wife.

Newt Gingrich did not even bother even to apologize, once he too had been exposed as an adulterer. Instead, he reverted to pathetically insincere religious platitudes: “There are things in my own life that I have gotten on my knees and turned to God and prayed about.”  It is hard to say which is the more laughable: the image of Newt down on his knees or the idea that God might deign to listen.

Until he was caught swooning over “pages” on the floor of the United States Congress, Mark Foley was an adamant proponent of legislation against a host of “sex crimes,” as well an advocate of abstinence as an alternative to birth control or abortion.

Larry Craig was an unyielding opponent of gay marriage, gay civil unions, and gay rights, until he was caught with his pants down in a public men’s room, whereupon his positions on such issues shed any shred of credibility.

The problem these and countless other sanctimonious Republicans face is this: the “values” they so vehemently wish to impose upon the rest of us do not square with their own values, to the extent they have any values at all.

It is one thing to be a sinner, which, to one degree or another, everyone is.  It is quite another to be a hypocrite.