Hypocrisy

This topic germinated with a book I read this week by Bernard Goldberg, 100 People Who are Screwing Up America. It was meant as a sort of light-hearted book to point out 100 people who he thinks are the major contributors to the coarseness of our society. Many are left-wingers, some are right-wingers, and the rest are just clueless, but all serve to help make his point. In fact, he really never attacked any specific principles held by anybody, but the lowbrow tactics they use to try to gain power or attention.

He has been viciously attacked by a bunch of left-leaning folks who happen to idolize most of the people in his book, none of whom actually bothered to read it. It's kind of amusing to see how foolish they make themselves look by confirming pretty much the entire premise of the book they're trashing so vociferously.

So anyway, it got me thinking about hypocrisy. Who gets called "hypocrite" more than anyone else these days? Yeah, Christians. And if you define hypocrisy as a failure to practice what one preaches, then all Christians are indeed hypocrites. But really that's the point of the Christian faith, in that all fall short and fail. But we recognize and admit our failings and pledge to ourselves to do better.

But where are the most obvious examples of hypocrisy in our culture?

Number one on my list are abortion-rights advocates. They're generally the same people that want to abolish the death penalty and save the animals. The typical PETA member marches one day against farmers raising animals for slaughter, then the next day to protest the Supreme Court nominee who is rumored to think that killing babies isn't a good idea. So let me see if I get this straight - save the whales and mass murderers but kill the babies? Seems the essence of hypocrisy to me.

To extend that discussion, has anybody in that crowd ever considered who's getting abortions? From reports I've seen, the vast majority of abortions are by poor black women. For those who call conservatives "nazis", who are the ones trying their hardest to thin out the population of undesirables through abortion? Isn't the primary justification for abortion to eliminate "unwanted" pregnancies? Wow, just a cursory look at the facts would seem to indicate the real fascists are NOW and NARAL and Planned Parenthood.

Another one I really like are the Hollywood activists. It cracks me up when an environmental activist actor or actress shows off their new hybrid automobile as proof of their sensitivity to the environment, then parks it in their garage between the Rolls and the Maserati. Then they take off to their next movie location in their private jet, which in a single trip burns more oil than all the cars in their garage use all year. Finally, they march against those who want to drill for more oil or build a new power plant, then go home to their mansion that uses 10 times the energy of the average home. Cracks me up.

The campaign last year had a terrific example. John Kerry had just made a speech pandering to the environmentalist left, where he seemed to oppose the evil SUV. A brave reporter later asked him, "Don't you own an SUV yourself?". He said it was his "family's", not his. Hilarious.

The public education advocates are another easy target. They protest loudly against using a voucher system to give people choice to find the best schools for their children, while almost universally send their own children to private schools. The implicit message there is that public schools may be fine for all of you little people out there, but we important people send our kids to private schools.

Then there are the pacifists. Now there are Christian pacifists such as the Amish and Mennonites that see it as a tenet of their faith. They will support no war under any circumstances, and definitely don't care whether it's a Republican or Democrat who leads the country into a war. Their faith says that God will take care of them and there are no justifiable reasons for fighting and killing. Nobody can reasonably accuse them of hypocrisy, at least on this point.

On the other hand, a whole new religion of pacifists has sprung up over the war on terror. These are the ones who didn't have anything to say when Clinton sent troops to Bosnia or blew up the aspirin factory in Sudan (Wow, can you only imagine what would have happened if Bush had made that mistake?). But now with the war on terror, all of a sudden there are all these newly converted pacifists! They say that Bosnia was necessary to stop the brutal genocide of the Serbs, but don't really care that Saddam was killing and torturing as many Iraqi citizens. There are those who say we deserved 9/11, somehow just because we elected Bush our President. Some of them even believe that if we're just nice to them and try to understand their plight, the terrorists will leave us alone.

So I got this mental image of terrorists attacking, say, the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. A group of actors led by Michael Moore come out of the theatre waving white flags saying, "Don't shoot! We are your friends!". A half-hour later while wiping down his automatic rifle from that day's killing, the leader of the Al Qaida commando unit laughs and shakes his head, saying "Crazy American Infidels".

OK, just one more. All those putting pressure (successfully) on the government to send money to help Africa complain about how America does so little to help the diseased and impoverished there. Have they ever heard of NGO's? That the aid organizations that make the greatest difference for the average impoverished child around the world are Christian missionary organizations? That the majority of funding for those missions comes from people in American churches? That when the government kicks in money, it almost always goes into the pockets and Swiss bank accounts of the dictators who run those countries?

Maybe that last one isn't so much hypocrisy as it is ignorance.

Anyway, some who read this might be offended. OK, fine, be offended if you must, but don't shoot the messenger of truth.