Why I Quit Calling Right-Wing Hypocrites "Hypocrites"
From the Duggars to the weekly examples of the latest clergy or legislator who has professed “Family Values” – which everyone knows is code for anti-LGBT equality - it has become routine, even expected, to find that the more someone righteously protests, the greater the likelihood that they have related skeletons in their closets struggling to burst out. It’s been a psychologist’s expectation for generations that the louder people object, the more likely it is that they’re covering up their own guilt. They’re easily, and rightly, labeled hypocrites. And preaching moral outrage against others while living and doing what they object to is a necessary part of legalistic, moralistic right-wing religions. But labeling them hypocrites is too easy. It actually lets the religious views, and most of the people who endorse them, off the hook. Any right-wing religionist can agree that someone didn’t live up to the standards they blame on divinity. “We’re all sinners,” after a...