HYPOCRISY: MORALISTS HAVE MUCH TO ANSWER FOR

The recent saga of Rush Limbaugh and his drug addiction raises important
questions.

The crucial thing is not that Limbaugh was a drug addict who fed his habit
on the black market. That private vice is small change compared with his
larger, public sin.

The real issue about Limbaugh is brought into focus by asking: What does it
say about a man if he can talk with contempt, without a shred of
compassion, about the shortcomings of other people while knowing that he is
no better than they?

And that raises the still larger question: What does it say about a society
if it repeatedly grants high moral authority to people who practice such
hypocrisy?

First, about the man. Even in a moralist who is himself above reproach, the
lack of compassion for sinners would be troubling enough. Especially since
most of Limbaugh's contempt has been directed at groups that have,
historically, been the least privileged in our society, one would hope for
moral condemnation to be leavened with human sympathy.

We in America talk a lot about things like sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll
when we address issues of sin and morality. But, the red letters in my New
Testament talk a lot more about the dangers of mounting the kind of high
horse Limbaugh rode into fame and fortune.

Which raises the question about the society that gives such a dishonest
voice so large a megaphone, making him the Godzilla of talk radio to spew
out the "hate the sinner" kind of moralism.

If Limbaugh were the only instance, the question would not arise. But
consider the other most prominent voices of American moralism in the past
decade. Surely, even a very short list would also include the voices of
William J. Bennett and Newt Gingrich.

Bennett is a less blatant instance. The man who became Mr. Virtue for the
1990s - with his best-selling "Book of Virtues" - and whom we've since
discovered has gambled away millions of dollars in what might have been a
gambling addiction, did climb onto a high horse. But he never treated with
scorn those who lacked the virtues he represented himself as having.

The same can hardly be said of Gingrich, the most prominent Republican
moralist in the 1990s. His disappearance in disgrace from his position as
speaker of the House cut short our marveling at how a man could so
viciously denounce the sexual misbehavior of Bill Clinton while at the same
time, as we eventually learned, he was conducting a similar and much more
serious sexual adventure of his own.

So there's a pattern there, and we're compelled to ask, what does it mean?

It connects to our having the most punitive of penal systems among Western
democracies. For we humans are never so eager to punish as when we make
others scapegoats for our own unacknowledged sins.

It connects to our failure to notice how bizarre it was for our president
to denounce Osama bin Laden as a coward for sending young men off to die
while remaining himself protected from danger. There's something in our
culture that can make it difficult to see ourselves in the same moral
perspective we apply to others. The unquestioning assumption of our own
righteousness can reflect blindness to the perspectives of others, as well
as to what lies within ourselves.

We need to be able to talk with each other about the moral challenges we
face and about how far short we fall in meeting them. But our conversation
about the problem of sin in our society needs to be about "us" and not
about "them."