If I were to write about it, I'd hardly be the first person to remark on the Eliot Spitzer scandal. It's just such a nice round story, though. The Mr. Clean crusader who swooped through the finance markets turns out to have spent in the neighborhood of $80,000 on high priced call girls. Little wonder his exposure was greeted with cheers on Wall Street. One could perhaps feel sorry for him in other circumstances, but those who play holier-than-thou have basically set themselves up to be judged by higher standards than mere mortals. And don't even get me started on Dr. (not really) Laura Schlessinger who, on NBC's Today Show, managed to actually blame Spitzer's wife for not taking care of her man's needs. More specifically:
"It's interesting. what you said about what men need -- men do need validation. When they come into the world they're born of a woman. Getting the validation from mommy is the beginning of needing it from a woman. When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like our hero, he's very susceptible to the charm of some other woman making him feel what he needs. These days, women don't spend a lot of time thinking about how they can give their men what they need."
"Susceptible to the charm of some other woman"? She was a $5,000 an hour call girl, Dr. Laura - are you some kind of moron? Oh wait, you don't have a book due out this week, do you? You do? Oh, quelle surprise! Of course, Dr. Laura ripped this off directly from Mark Driscoll, who used this defense on behalf of Ted Haggard, whose wife was thrown unceremoniously under the bus too.
Speaking of holier-than-thou, it doesn't get any more so than at the Vatican, where the seven deadly sins have been revised to include accumulating obscene wealth - something the Vatican has more experience with than any body on the earth, so I guess they know whereof they speak. I'm guessing Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in "sins and penance", probably signed the order with a solid gold fountain pen, and the irony would be completely lost on him. Far too many people have made hay with that, too, so I hardly feel original here.
There's another heaping portion of hypocrisy lying around waiting to be stepped in in the good old Church of England. There's the case of the Bishop of Horsham, who is apparently just another good ol' (sort of) closeted gay Anglo-Catholic bishop who just loves to support our ever so lovely gay bashing so-called Anglican renegades from the Episcopal Church. Now, even this wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that the Bishop of Horsham is still welcome to fulfill all of his episcopal duties without hindrance. He will also be off to Lambeth without a care in the world, and with the full blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury - unlike a certain Bishop of New Hampshire. "Don't ask, don't tell" was a stupid policy when the US military adopted it, and it remains a stupid, hypocritical policy today, but apparently it's still alive and well in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion.
All of which just makes it sadder to see a series of posts from Maggi Dawn about a very nice visit to Cambridge a couple of weeks ago by the Archbishops of York and Canterbury. It's nice to see the personal and human side of public figures, espoecially ion the wake of Rowan's Sharia Law Escapade (now there's an idea for a TV show...). However, at some point the Archbishop of Canterbury surely has to realize he can't appease Rome, and the rabid conservatives in the Anglican Communion, and move the church into the 21st (dare I even say the 20th) century.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - it took a woman in Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori to begin dismantling the old boys network here in the Episcopal Church, and it will probably take a woman to do it in the Church of England, except... fat chance of even getting a female bishop there within the next ten years or so and maybe fifty before we see a female Archbishop of Canterbury.
Strangely enough, hypocrisy isn't one of the seven deadly sins, and it's also one the Vatican managed to miss the second time around. Maybe it's because they don't have mirrors there...
