Lazy:
The Nature Of Hypocrisy (as I see it)
For what it's worth. And we are all products/creations of our own thoughts.
When I was about twenty-two and in college, I had a gay friend (about twenty-eight) who was married (+two children). I sort of watched him come out of the closet. He would mostly explain what was going on in his life and I'd listen.
One thing he said during those times has stayed vividly with me over the years. He said that he thought about sex at least once every 3-4 minutes all day, all the time. He said he had no control over it: He would be listening to a professor lecturing and his gaze would turn to another fellow male student and he would start having sex thoughts about him.
I thought this was a lot and also sort of obsessive--at the time. But then I started watching my own thoughts. I'd walk into a lecture hall and immediately start scoping out the ladies. When the lecture was getting boring, my mind would wander toward some other young lady. I was doing the exact same thing but with girls, but also, perhaps, not quite as frequently. And perhaps the intensity of my imagining was not as powerful (I didn't imagine having sex with her in the aisle for 5-10 minutes while the professor's lecture was going on--for the most part). The thought patterns were similar between my gay friend and I and didn't vary too much in experience except that mine were about girls and his were about boys. We had much more in common than I had previously thought. I would be walking down the hallway with a different, straight friend in a heated and intense philosophical discussion and some hot blonde Minnesota babe would walk by and "Wow" the conversation was driven completely from our minds as our heads simultaneously twisted around. (So much for leading a meaningful life.) We laughed and giggled, sort of, and made little nasty comments about where we wanted to go for [-]the rest of our lives[/-] a while.
Anyway, I think everyone has these sorts of thoughts, even old farts and ladies (but for the ladies a very few times-and mostly only on their honeymoons
). Metaphorically, a lot of us want to eat all the potato chips all the time. But . . . I think over time or as we get a little older and move out of our twenties, we start having meta-thoughts about these types of mild obsessions/thoughts. We may think "I shouldn't be thinking about sex quite so much; I need to focus on my work or my family or something a bit less prurient."
These higher order thoughts are sort of a gift from God as I see things. They recognize one's actual constant sex thoughts as less than ideal and interfering of/with mature behavior. They lay out an ideal behavior (family values?
) as a comparative. . . . you end up seeing your own very real behavior in juxtaposition to a set of morals or ideal behavior. The gap between the two when it is recognized is usually identified as hypocrisy. "Do what I think is right, not what I actually do--which is wrong." (If our imaginations had free play in the world . . . would things ever be a mess.
)
We all have remarkably similar experiences of hypocrisy as best I can tell. They fall into the pattern described above, but just with different objects and words and people attached at times.
Now to stay directly on topic. My pure speculation is that Larry Craig has these obsessive patterns of thought about sex. And they never lessened with age. It's very hard to do something about such thoughts if they never slow down or lessen in intensity . . . (poor guy). To my mind, one can accept them for what they are and just sort of channel them as best as possible toward something better. Or one can deny they exist and box them up as best possible, e.g. in a Republican, conservative blanket, creating a worse situation in the long run because of one's inability to recognize these thoughts as a natural part of one's self and then work with them to make life better, more elevating. I think Larry Craig failed to do anything positive about his situation. He had a dark lizard running down his leg, controlling him. And by clinging to that hypocrisy without understanding it and trying to close the gap from one side or the other or both sides, things squirted out in a terrible fashion and all across the national consciousness.
I see Craig as someone who recognized his baser sex impulses (duh, obviously) and may have been so upset with them that he ran in fright and terror to the other side of the hypocrisy gap as a refuge from it for forty years or more. (But I may very well be very wrong.) He made things worse for others and himself by adamantly refusing to understand and subsequently soften his many harsh judgments.
We all have these hypocrisy defects, some more mildly evident in some folks than in others, and we should be sharing and helping each other to solve them, not boxing them up, labeling them as bad, and turning away in disgust. We all share similar thoughts and emotions.
