The mote and the beam

As I posted on America is Angry a while back, it’s possible to make too much fuss over hypocrisy.
When Indiana Rep. Mark Souder, a right-wing family values, abstinence-education supporter, retired over his affair with a staffer, some liberals were quick to point out the hypocrisy. That may be an effective political tactic, but I don’t think it’s the real issue; the real issue is that abstinence education is a lousy idea that doesn’t work and wastes millions of dollars (did you know the government even funds abstinence-only training for twentysomethings? Adults?). If Soulder had been an absolutely faithful married guy who tried to live by the standards he espoused, the policies he championed would still suck.
But then we have Washington Post writer Michael Gerson asserting that Souder is still preferable to the people who opposed his standards because at least he had standards to fall short of: “The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals … I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies. In the end, hypocrisy is preferable to decadence.”
Where to start? Well, for one thing, Gerson’s alternatives are crap. I didn’t see the bloggers criticizing Souder proclaim that the ideal of marital fidelity had been discredited or that “all standards are lies.” That’s just a throwback to the old idea that the left rejects “moral absolutes” or similar bilge The criticism of Souder focused on the fact that he’s pushing others to live up to a standard he couldn’t live up to himself, and that’s a very different thing.
In the Gospels, when Jesus discusses hypocrisy, he wasn’t talking about people who failed to live a moral life; he was quite forgiving of them (though as with the woman taken in adultery, it was with the understanding they should go and sin no more). What he targeted were the people who focus on sawdust in other people’s eyes and ignore the beam in their own. Which is what we have with Souder.
If Souder had been a regular guy who cheated, nobody would be accusing him of hypocrisy (which is not to say he’d be forgiven—adultery’s a bad thing in its own right). But he was a politician trying to push his standards of moral behavior on other people when it turned out there was a beam in his own eye. That’s an entirely different thing.
Newt Gingrich played the same card regarding his own unethical activities: Yes, I’m a sinner, but everyone is, so let’s move on. Sorry, dude, nobody gets to absolve themselves of sin or tell other people to ignore the beam in their eye.
And this is the most charitable interpretation, that the traditional-values warriors aren’t just shamming virtue for the benefit of votes. Sure, Gerson insists that Souder is a deeply moral man, but pretty much everyone accused of scandalous behavior claims the same. It’s worth remembering that Bill Clinton publicly apologized for his affair (and for lying about it), and asked for forgiveness; the right didn’t give it. Almost like they had a double standard or something.
Gerson quotes C.S. Lewis to the effect that “a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.” The trouble is, his column makes it clear he prefers the self-righteous prigs.