Aaron Keith Harris
2007-08-31 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzalez are perhaps the only two people happier than the Washington media and the liberal blogging corps to hear the news of Sen. Larry Craig’s would-be toilet tryst.

The departing administration loyalists gave Bush bashers an opportunity to riff on the theme of rats fleeing a sinking ship for a while. But they dropped it pretty quick as soon as the week-old, yet unreported, news of Craig’s arrest hit the Web.

That’s partly because the scandal is an opportunity to grab viewers and readers with a healthy dose of salaciousness. CNN, for one, aired a lengthy segment this week on the gay male subculture of cruising for transitory sex online and in bathrooms, parks and other public places.

But it’s also because playing gotcha with hypocritical conservatives is a greater source of merriment than harping at the ones who stick to their guns.

The left’s scorn for Craig is most intense over the fact that he has opposed gay marriage and other gay rights issues. Where was the left’s outrage over New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey? After all, he was accused of misusing his authority by appointing an unqualified person to head the state’s homeland security office. But because he’s a Democrat, he was quickly forgiven, then handed a book deal and invited on Oprah.

Hypocrisy is one of our culture’s cardinal secular sins and the reason why says a lot about our culture. Though Oscar Wilde is often given credit for it, the 17th century French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld said “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”

That means although one may have private flaws and peccadilloes, it’s generally in everyone’s best interest to keep them to one’s self. And just as it’s wrong to condemn someone else for similar shortcomings to one’s own, it is also wrong to tear down the standard one falls short of.

Bill Clinton is not thought of as a hypocrite, but his legacy is a shameful one. Like Craig, McGreevey, Mark Foley and others, Clinton’s sexual appetite led him to do things that most would consider distasteful, if not morally wrong.

Is there a difference between one married man receiving oral sex from a 19-year-old intern in the Oval Office and another married man soliciting the same thing from a stranger in an airport men’s room?

Clinton lied his way through the Monica Lewinsky affair. And his defenders said that was just fine. Sex should be a private thing and everyone lies about it anyway, they said. It has absolutely no effect on how a politician performs his duties.

Enough people agreed and Clinton got away with it all. But the fallout was that marital fidelity and truth-telling by political leaders — in court and in front of the cameras — were devalued to the point of ridicule.

There are things worse than hypocrisy, like ignorance and apathy. And there are plenty of sex scandals that no one seems to care about or even notice.

Every year, thousands of girls and young women are sexually brutalized in societies, mainly Muslim, by the practice of female genital mutilation, the ritualized removal of the clitoris, with the intent that they never experience sexual pleasure.

Every year, thousands of girls and young women from around the world are fraudulently led away from their homes in poor countries and forced into the slavery of pornography and prostitution.

Illegitimacy, sexual assault and abortion ruin the lives of men, women and children in our own neighborhoods every day.

But sex scandals like these are hard to tell and hard to watch, and we’re busy hunting hypocrites.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.