Tim Murphy, Harvey Weinstein and the hypocrisy question

I've long asserted that hypocrisy is a pretty useless weapon in the struggle between contending worldviews. I've based that on the fact that a principle is either true or not, completely independent of the character of those who champion it.

But I'm now coming to see that the hypocrite's worldview does play a big role. Those whose weltanschauungs most closely hew to that which is actually good, right and true ought to be held to a higher standard than those whose take on it all is warped, or at least sloppily arrived at. (Still, we
are talking about the shame people heap on themselves, not the veracity of the principles they espouse.)

That's why Representative Tim Murphy's forced resignation is a big deal. He's been a member of the House's pro-life caucus and has earned a 92 percent score from the Family Research Council. But he's also been conducting an extramarital affair, and when he thought his mistress was pregnant, tried to persuade her to have an abortion. (It turns out she wasn't pregnant.)

Now, to reiterate the point I've made twice so far in this post, this says nothing about the issue of abortion - or, for that matter, the principle of marital fidelity. I think some of the left-leaners making hay about it on social media would like us to believe that it does, but a dead fetal American and a betrayed spouse are the sympathy-deserving byproducts of the violation of immutable principles regardless of any other facts.

He has to go, because his disgrace is his original wrongdoing, compounded by the context, namely, his public positions on the matters at the core of the situation.

Now, Harvey Weinstein, as despicable as his track record has been, does not come in for the kind of twofer disgrace that Murphy does. Weinstein's public face has been one of pure Leftism, a component of which is the out-of-touch-with-reality notion that males and females are not substantially different and that, in fact, gender is fluid. Oh, and, according to that way of seeing human life, abortion is just fine. It is on that basis that he's wanted to prattle about human dignity.

In a certain sense, his hypocrisy shows that his secret self - the one that asked Ashley Judd to watch him take a shower - actually hewed closer to the way the universe is really designed. Men are far bigger horn-dogs than women, generally speaking. (Yesterday, I saw a tweet - I forget who posted it - that said if a woman made such a request to any size sample group of men, she'd get an 80 percent response rate; a man is going to get about 3 percent).

So his bust is that he was publicly denying what any and all of us know deep down about how human sexuality really works, while adhering to how it works in the most unsavory way one can.

One final note: Have you ever noticed what a high percentage of instances of hypocrisy have to do with sex? Catholic priests scandals. Bill Clinton. Bill Cosby. Bill O'Reilly, Roman Polanski.

That sex drive is some powerful stuff. It's like a volatile chemical that hd better be left in the canister unless one is fully up to speed on its proper handling. It is a huge aspect of the images of temptation that come to us from humanity's various creation stories. The forbidden fruit. Pandora's box. The scroll in the sarcophagus. 

So it seems that four main responses to the mishandling of this powerful force are apparent:

• An understanding, developed by rigorous reflection / prayer / wisdom earned by humbling experience, of the proper harnessing of the sexual impulse
• An assertion for public consumption that one so understands, and that one is dedicated to fostering that understanding among society's citizens, while secretly behaving otherwise
• An espousal of a worldview divorced from reality that nonetheless ascribes dignity to women, albeit for warped reasons, and
• A life lived in forthright abandonment of any such concern, which is how, say, publishers of nudie-picture magazines have generally gone about it.

It seems that the more closely one proceeds on the basis of how reality actually works, the less trouble one will find oneself in.

It can never be accomplished with complete consistency. Every life has its oopsies.

Hence the need for grace.

Memo to Murphy and Weinstein: It's available to you, for the small price of giving up being your own god.