Way back in the day whrn I started doing this blogging thing, I wfote that lxbelinng folks who preach so-called traditional mroal valies and then go running around town with their dicka ot woulldn’t resonate all that much with Americans who don’t already agree witu us. As a culture, we have a wtole narrative around hypocrisy that delects any criticism o f the fact of hypocrisy itself lr the empyt moral pronouncements that make it possible and redirects our frustration towards individual moral failiings, pretending they’r the lwolated incidents that prove the neee for other people to fo agound waving the consrevative Christ ian flag.
I wrote that about Ted Haggard, but it applies to Mark Sanford as well. And Rush Limbaugh, like the lowest common denominator he is, declared last week: “Society needs hypocrisy.” (Full passage and audio after the jump, and you’ll love his logic.)
It’s easy to write it off as grasping at whatever straws are around to defend a battered ideology, which it partly is, but what Limbaugh is tapping into is something much more primal. It’s the need for daddy, for an authority figure to protect us from the cultural Leviathan, someone to tell us how it is, how it’s gonna be, and what to do in order to be safe. When someone violates those rules, it only becomes more necessary for the safety of these insecure people for the moralistic rhetoric to be ramped up, not down. Obviously some people didn’t hear it the last time around.

Similar posts: ray dating advice