Aside from Youtube videos featuring cats attacking babies, moral hypocrisy is perhaps the most hilarious thing one can witness.  Larry Craig, a conservative senator who was known to support anti-gay legislation, provided countless hours of hilarity when it was discovered that he frequents men’s restrooms in search of man-on-man lovin’.  His infamous foot-tapping signal for gay sex, along with his lame appeals to his “wide stance” to cover up his obviously lascivious nature, while hilarious in their own right, are made all the more hilarious owing to his avowed conservativism.  Similarly, when megachurch preacher and anti-gay bigot Ted Haggard was outed as a homosexual and drug user by a  male prostitute/meth dealer, one couldn’t help giggling in glee as the pastor’s career went down in raging flames.

But this brings forward several deep questions about the nature of morality, psychology, and belief.  How could some of the most powerful anti-gay bigots turn out to be homosexuals themselves?  What is the psychology behind this perverse form of self-hatred?  And who in the hell would ever be desperate enough to have sex with Ted Haggard?  You couldn’t pay me enough money to touch those swollen, babboon-ass lips.

Anyone can readily recognize that liberals and conservatives tend to be diametrically opposed when it comes to ethical questions.  Whereas liberals voice concerns over social justice, fairness, and the harm that may come to baby seals covered in crude oil, conservatives tend to rail against illegal immigration, homosexuality, and those unpatriotic liberals who care more about worthless seals than the mexicans who are stealing our hard-won American jobs (because every American is clamoring to be a migrant worker, obviously).

Social scientists have explanations for these wild differences and almost incommensurate views of morality.  Jonathan Haidt, for instance, has broken down ethical foundations into five major groupings:

1. Harm/Care (associated with empathetic concern for others’ well-being)
2. Fairness/Reciprocity (associated with concepts of basic rights and equality)
3. Ingroup/Loyalty (associated with patriotism, and concern with society over the individual)
4. Authority/Respect (associated with deference to tradition or religious and political leaders)
5. Purity/Sanctity (associated with feelings of disgust and contamination)

What Haidt has found is that liberals and conservatives show consistent patterns regarding these groupings.  The liberal hippies naturally gravitate toward Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity.  Patriotism is regarded as xenophobic nonsense, unnecessay respect for outdated traditions is seen as a barrier to progress, and sanctity is seen as a metaphysically suspect concept that should have no bearing on ethical considerations.  (Of course, liberals have their own versions of the purity concept which can be found in their silly love of “organic,” “all-natural” foods and mineral water.)  On the other hand, conservatives tend to spread their values evenly among all five categories, and while they still value fairness and harm reduction, they do not value it at the expense of concerns about ingroup loyalty, respect for tradition, and sanctity.

Obviously, these moral differences illustrate exactly why conservatives endlessly rant about issues like homosexuality.  For the liberal, whose concerns are mainly those of fairness and harm reduction, it appears obvious that homosexuals should have equal rights of marriage and should not be stigmatized or treated differently by society.  But to conservatives concerns about purity and tradition also take precedence, so they argue against homosexuality on the basis of religious authority, appeal to the concept of “traditional” marriage, and see homosexuality as an impure, unnatural act.

So now we know why conservatives hate homosexuals, but why would a homosexual espouse conservative values, and why would some of the most vocal and powerful opponents turn out to be gay themselves?  Why would toe-tappin’ Larry Craig oppose gay marriage, and why would cock-massaging Ted Haggard preach endlessly against homosexuality as a godless abomination?  It is easy to understand how people could have conservative values that privelege authority, tradition, and purity, because these values clearly served adaptive purposes in our evolutionary past—obeying authority served to hold together society and concepts of purity and contamination acted as barriers against bacterial infections in prescientific times.  But it seems an astounding coincidence that many of the greatest opponents of these ethical issues would turn out to be hypocrites who practice exactly what they preach against.

A study about handwashing may hold the answer to this puzzle.  What does handwashing have to do with cock-loving conservatives, you say?  More than you’d think!

Simone Schnall and colleagues’ study “With a Clean Conscience” demonstrated that an act as simple as washing one’s hands can decrease moral outrage and harsh judgments.  Basically, the study recorded the moral judgments of a group of people who were exposed to cognitive concepts of cleanliness and purity (the handwashing group) versus a control group (the dirty group).  The results showed that those who washed their hands rated an assortment of immoral actions in a significantly less severe manner than those in the group with the filthy, uncleansed hands.  The study mentions and builds off studies that have shown that when people are exposed to disgusting, impure conditions, they tend to be more severe in their moral judgments.  Basically, those that see themselves as cleansed and pure are more forgiving, and those that see themselves as somehow dirtied or disgusted harden their hearts.

Now, to those with conservative sentiments born into a society with strong religious traditions concerning the impurity of homosexuality, obviously such people will have negative attitudes about homosexuality even if they are homosexual themselves.  A conservative heterosexual will follow tradition and cry out against homosexuality, but he will view himself as pure and undirtied owing to his good, wholesome heterosexual love of boobies.  But a conservative homosexual will also follow tradition and purity standards and cry out against homosexuality.  And the homosexual conservative will cry out all the harder and more actively precisely because he is homosexual, as he will see himself as impure and dirty and feel disgust at himself.  And as the handwashing study indicates, those who see themselves as cleansed and pure are less likely to be severe in their judgments, but those that see themselves as impure and dirtied will be highly judgmental and hard-hearted.  Thus, the psychology behind the phenonmenon of homosexual anti-gay activists now appears to be a quite vivid demonstration of psychological theories about moral purity and authority.  The loudest opponents of homosexuality turn out to be gay because their feelings of impurity and dirtiness drive them to make harsher, bolder moral condemnations.

So remember this the next time you see someone who appears unreasonably angry about homosexuality or any other issue of sanctity.  You can rest assured knowing that they suffer the fate of the self-hating hypocrite, and you can feel sorry for them as they wage an outward war against perceived impurity but crumble inwardly with a latent war against themselves.  It is a truly funny thing to watch such bigots implode upon themselves when their true natures are revealed, but it also reveals a sort of sadness about the human condition, and our willingness to deny and revile ourselves for group cohesion and tradition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 5:59 AM and is filed under Politics, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.