The Reactionary Utopian
                     August 24, 2006


TWO WAYS OF LYING
by Joe Sobran

     I'd always thought of hypocrisy as an essentially 
simple thing until the debate over ninth-month (or 
"partial-birth") abortion. But there is hypocrisy and 
hypocrisy.

     One kind of hypocrisy we are all familiar with: 
preaching one thing while cold-bloodedly practicing 
another. The notorious example is the televangelist who 
gets caught in a motel room with a girl. Or the 
politician who publicly weeps over his sister's death 
from lung cancer, then turns out to have been chummy with 
rich tobacco farmers even after witnessing her agony.

     Yet this kind of hypocrisy does reinforce the social 
norm. The hypocrite has already condemned himself by his 
own preaching. He's defenseless when caught in his 
inconsistency.

     But if some people don't practice what they preach, 
there are others who, you might say, hypocritically 
preach what they practice. The stupid hypocrite sets 
himself up for a fall by feigning respect for the 
standard by which he will be judged; the smart hypocrite 
attacks the standard itself.

     I really don't think there is much honest 
disagreement about abortion. It's killing. Its target is 
the inconvenient human being in the womb. But by 
pretending that this is a "religious" rather than a 
simple biological question, the new breed of hypocrite 
has managed to gain acceptance of abortion.

     You can understand confusion and uncertainty over 
the tiniest embryos, but I always assumed that advocates 
of abortion would draw the line at practices that 
obviously destroy well-formed children, and inflict agony 
on them to boot. Draining out the brains, so that the 
skull can be crushed, so that the child can be killed 
without violating the law -- well, you hardly need 
theological indoctrination to recoil from such cruelty.

     Yet there are still people who profess to see 
nothing wrong with abortion, even at this stage. And by 
pretending that what they do or endorse is consistent 
with their own consciences, they escape the charge of 
barbarity. At least they're "sincere"!

     Are they? Then why don't they frankly call what they 
approve of "killing"? We kill germs and cockroaches and 
cute little lambs, and we don't shrink from saying so, 
because we regard it as our right to kill them. So if a 
"fetus" has no human worth, what's wrong with killing it, 
and saying it's killing?

     No, the new hypocrite knows perfectly well that 
abortion is wrong, but finds it expedient to pretend 
otherwise. And the rest of us support this hypocrisy by 
presuming its sincerity.

     Consider homosexuality. Everyone knows it's a 
serious disorder; nobody wishes it on anyone he loves; a 
parent who tried to turn a child homosexual would be 
considered monstrous. But the new hypocrisy requires us 
to pretend that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality 
except "society's attitude" toward it, which of course we 
are supposed to correct.

     In fact the new hypocrisy is a necessary aspect of 
the "new morality." There is no "new" morality. There is 
only the systematic pretense that sexual vice is not 
vice.

     Under the new rules, you can be called a hypocrite 
for upholding old standards of virtue that you don't 
exemplify perfectly; but you can't be called a hypocrite 
for sinking into utter moral squalor, as long as you 
profess to believe there's nothing wrong with it. So the 
defender of traditional morality is kept constantly on 
the defensive, since only he can be accused of hypocrisy.

     It's quite a clever system, because it works 
entirely to the advantage of one side, while the other 
side has been slow to figure it out. But it boils down to 
something simple and obvious.

     If you set high standards, there is the danger that 
you'll create an embarrassing gap between what you 
believe and what you do. The actual may fall short of the 
ideal; in fact it's almost certain to do so, and you may 
look hypocritical when you're only human.

     But if you profess low standards, there's no danger 
of such a gap. Your behavior is all too likely to meet 
your standards. If you openly advocate pedophilia, then 
the one thing you can't be accused of when you're caught 
in bed with a little child is hypocrisy.

     One thing about the old hypocrisy: It was more 
innocent.

[This column was originally published by Universal Press 
Syndicate April 24, 1997.]

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