Another one bites the dust

The honor roll of right-wing moral paragons is long: David Vitter, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Bob Allen, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, John Ensign.....and now, to that august company, a new name can be added: Mark Sanford.

Like many Republicans, Sanford holds strong views on the moral standards the rest of us should adhere to; he is, for example, on record as taking a hard line on adultery by public figures, and favors the full Christian Right agenda of anti-gay discrimination measures. Those fags are a threat to the integrity of the sacred institution of marriage, after all.

Unlike some, I don't hesitate or equivocate in rejoicing every time one of these Bible-thumping right-wing Stepford husbands goes down. When somebody preaches a particular moral value system, and condemns others for deviating from it (as Sanford condemned Clinton back in the day), and, in fact, builds a political career and identity on being holier-than-thou on the subject -- and then is caught egregiously betraying that value system -- then it's quite appropriate to call him on his hypocrisy. In fact, it's quite appro-priate to point fingers and guffaw.

And yes, it is worse when one of these preachy family-values types does it than when somebody like Bill Clinton does it. Bill Clinton didn't build his career and political identity on preaching sexual morality at the rest of us.

(Oh, and Rush Limbaugh is being even stupider than usual.)

Make no mistake -- the agenda of these people is evil. It goes far beyond the reasonable position of not cheating on one's wife. They want to roll back abortion rights, the recent advances of gays, the separation of church and state, and the Devil knows what else. We don't need to exercise much imagination to know what lies at the end of that road, because we've seen it in practice in Iran over the last thirty years. So, since it seems to be the case that this kind of aggressive piety is often wedded to bottomless hypocrisy (and don't you dare doubt for a millisecond that more than a few of those Iranian mullahs have women or boys on the side too), I'm more than happy to see the hypocrisy discredit the piety.