Commentary: As Recent Disclosures of Rank Hypocrisy Prove, the ‘Values Agenda’ Needs a Major Overhaul
Date: Wednesday, October 31, 2007
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com
I guess you could say that the Rev. Gary Aldridge, a Baptist minister and associate of the late Moral Majority leader the Rev. Jerry Falwell, was a believer in more things than just Jesus Christ and the Resurrection.
Seems he was a believer in safe sex as well.
Or, at least, that’s what a recently released autopsy report -- which was published in its entirety on the Smoking Gun web site -- showed. The 51-year-old Montgomery, Alabama pastor was found dead in his home this summer. He had accidentally asphyxiated himself by donning two complete rubber wet suits, a rubber face mask, diving gloves and slippers, and a head mask.
He also had a dildo in his anus -- covered with a rubber.
It’s sad that Aldridge died in the bizarre way that he did. But what’s even sadder is that because of the rampant hypocrisy that rules these days and is the stuff that shapes the so-called values agenda, his family won’t be able to enjoy the privileges of privacy.
And for that they should blame Aldridge’s mentor, Falwell, and the rest of the religious right adherents.
They are, after all, the ones who elevated former President Bill’s Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky to unprecedented levels of hysteria. They are, after all, the ones who made sexual behavior political; who transformed gay marriage into a pressing national issue by scaring people into believing that the only way to save that already beleaguered institution is to save it from gay people.
Aldridge was married. Yet that apparently didn’t stop him from caving in to his freak-nasty side.
He was also a hypocrite. The same way the Rev. Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was a hypocrite after he confessed to buying methamphetamine and getting a rubdown from a male prostitute. The prostitute claimed that he and Haggard met for sex once a month for three years.
Of course, some people would argue that preachers aren’t perfect. And they’d be right. But what’s wrong is when people like Aldridge, Haggard and others preach policies that are rooted in condemnation and intolerance. Never mind that many of those same people are committing the same acts and fetishes that they say they would like to see banned by the Constitution.
That’s why sin, as a values issue, is a phony one. The people who latch on to it are too lazy or too stupid to face more complex issues. And that’s why it troubles me when black people blindly follow the lead of those who have pinned the fortunes of this country on controlling people’s private behavior and lifestyles, and not on its real problems.
It’s easy, for example, to talk about saving marriage from homosexuals. It’s harder to talk about saving marriage from growing poverty and unemployment that makes it difficult for many black men to support a wife and children. It’s also harder to talk about reshaping a culture that no longer regards marriage as an institution, but as an afterthought.
We don’t need gays to threaten marriage. It’s threatened enough as it is.
To be clear, I have nothing against voting values. I do, however, have a problem with what suffices for values these days. For me, ending poverty ought to be a value. Committing U.S. policy and resources toward ending the genocide in Darfur and in other places of untold suffering, rather than looking for reasons to create new wars and new suffering should be a value.
In other words, the values agenda needs a makeover. But that won’t happen. It won’t happen because the people who are controlling that agenda know that it is more convenient to find a bogeyman, or to blame homos or hussies, for this nation’s problems.
But what they ought to know by now, as the death of Aldridge and the fall of Haggard shows, is that an agenda based largely on controlling people’s private behavior is risky. It’s risky because many of the people who are supposed to be carrying it out probably violate it in one way or the other. So when the Aldridges and Haggards of the world are outed, their supporters can’t rightly demand that their privacy be respected -- because much of the values agenda is built on punishing people for what they do in their private lives.
And that can’t be healthy for them or their families.
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