Republican Town Hall Vandalism II: Hypocrisy

The doctrine, "Do Under Others As You Would Have them do undo you," is not a specifically Christian moral principle. In fact, it is nearly universal among moral systems including those that pre-date Christianity. However, it is a part of Christianity and we are meant to understand a good Christian to be somebody who follows this principle.

I think that it is also safe to assume that a majority of these town hall vandals – the ones who are intent on silencing civil debate on the merits of a national health care proposal – are people who would call themselves Christians, and who think of themselves as good Christians.

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Yet, they act in total violation of the basic moral principle.

At the same time, I would also wager that they would be critical of any other group – of Democrats, for example – if those others would have been similarly disruptive. In fact, I would bet that they would demand the harshest treatment of those who would disrupt such a meeting. They would have likely been called who decided to adopt a practice of disrupting town halls. After all, the Republicans are the ‘law and order’ party and one thing they cannot stand is liberal violence and mayhem in the pursuit of a political goal.

Yet, here they are, doing the very thing they would condemn, without a twinge of conscience.

A good person will sometimes do something that is a prima facie violation of a moral principle. However, this branch of the Republican party seems to lack any aversion to doing that which is immoral, They barrel full speed into moral hypocrisy without a second thought.

It is as if there is a branch of Christianity that holds that as long as they repeat the name Jesus at least 10 times per day, and who use the word in a sentence at least twice in a twenty-four hour period, they cannot do any wrong gets an automatic exclusion from moral constraints. Morality is for ‘the other guy’ – for those who do not say the magic word Jesus in a proper context.

The rest of us – in fact, American culture on the whole – are made the victims of their immorality. Intellectually reckless, unthinking, inconsiderate hypocrites insist on vandalizing social debate so that a final decision is based on ignorance and, in many cases, fictions that these people have decided to promote rather than basing those decisions on facts and reason.

So this branch of Christians – those who think that their personal friendship with Jesus buys them moral immunity to do as they please without regard for the impact on others – are responsible for the world being a worse place than it would have otherwise been. The ill effects of their morality not only touch on their victims. It touches on every member of society who must live in a culture of intellectual recklessness, selfish distortions of the truth, and hypocrisy, including others of their own kind.

They, too, must live in a society where policies are based on fiction, have no tie to reality, where civic debate is stalled, and where they as much as everybody else are forced to endure the trials of living in the morally challenged society that they create.

It would be nice if they were to become the type of person that they claim their God wants them to be. It would be nice if they would put aside this delusion that their God has given them some special immunity from morality that allows them to do whatever evil pleases them

It would be nice if they would actually do unto others what they would demand that others do unto them. Where on of those moral requirements they would impose on others while they see themselves as having divine dispensation to violate is the moral requirement to establish and maintain civil discourse in government meetings.

It would be nice if those who like to claim that they had a special reason to be moral would quit acting as if being religion gives one special permission to abandom morality.