Hypocrisy, sin and fighting the demons within

As you may have heard by now, Christian Ziegler, whose wife Bridget co-founded Moms for Liberty, is under investigation for sexual assault. Even wilder, the Zieglers have allegedly been in a long-term three-way relationship with the alleged victim: Bridged Ziegler and the victim were in a lesbian relationship as part of that (Ziegler says they did it once, a year ago). Which given how very anti-gay the Zieglers and Moms for Liberty are, makes for quite a story.

According to the victim, Mr. Ziegler asked to come over alone but she told him she was more into his wife. The victim says he then came over and raped her, though he says it was consensual (my default assumption is to believe the victim). That’s horrific; the consensual three-way, as far as I’m concerned, would normally be their own business. I skew monogamous and monoamorous myself but I don’t think three ways, metamours, etc. are objectionable though they can be (unhealthy power dynamics, one partner is pressured or bullied into it, etc.). That said punching down at gays while engaging in bisexual three ways makes the Zieglers a pair of loathsome hypocrites.

Not that hypocrisy is the primary problem. Moms for Liberty’s support for Ron DeStalinist’s Don’t Say Gay policies is bad and bigoted, period. Whether Ziegler lives by the morality she claims to support is irrelevant to how awful the policies she supports are. But if the charges are true, she herself comes off an even worse person.

As I wrote more than a decade ago, some conservatives insist that hypocrites aren’t bad, well as long as they’re conservative. Hypocrisy, the argument runs, is the tribute vice pays to virtue: at least they’re promoting proper moral standards, unlike liberals with their gay marriage and free love and their insistence on consent. Besides (the argument runs), Christians understand that we are all sinners: we don’t judge someone because they aspire to be moral and fall short. The possibility the culprit was a liar who never aspired to be moral doesn’t come up unless it’s a non-conservative or non-Republican: nobody on the right ever applies “we’re all sinners” to Bill Clinton.

It is true that some Christian (and other) conservatives try to walk the walk (as they understand it) and fall short. Some of them are projecting, as Samantha Field says: they think humans are insatiable sluts and perverts and desperately fight to put the demon of sex in a corked bottle. And some of them see the advantage of posing as a champion of morality and pretending they’re fighting groomers even as they engage in grooming.

I think it’s possible to construct a taxonomy breaking some of this down:

You try to be a good person but you fail: you drive drunk and hit someone, you have an affair, you harass a subordinate, you do something petty like key your partner’s car after they dump you. In the aftermath you admit what you did, ask for forgiveness, make restitution and don’t do it again (which as Rabbi Ruttenberg says does not mean you get forgiveness and is separate from making things right with god, assuming you’re a believer).

Next: same situation but you don’t admit what you’ve done or make restitution. You do, however, avoid doing it again. I think you’re still just a fallible human being rather than a hypocrite. Though if you’re talking loudly about how moral you are and how you’d never ever, do shit like that, then yeah, we’re in hypocrisy land.

The next step down is the person who doesn’t stop. They keep driving drunk, they keep cheating, they keep retaliating against lovers or dates who piss them off but they still give lip service to the principles they’re not following. At this point they’re hypocrites, even if they tell themselves they’re striving to be good. If you’re admitting it — you keep backsliding on breaking an addiction but you don’t lie about it—that’s a different story.

And then we get the person who claims to be moral, doesn’t live by their code but demands everyone else do so. As Roy Edroso says, “human society depends upon at least a rudimentary concept of justice. We can forgive inconsistencies, and even admire trying and failing, but when someone amasses power from us based on his personal superiority, and is proved a fraud, he has broken the basic bargain of leadership. We mock him not out of meanness, but out of a communal survival instinct.”