Monumental Hypocrisy

Alabama's special election to fill the vacant Senate seat is in eighteen days. I've posted twice before about this race (links here and here).

Since my last entry, the sexual allegations against the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, have increased exponentially. To date, nine women have come forward to allege they were aggressively accosted and sometimes sexually assaulted by Moore when they were teenagers, and some were under the age of consent.

Additionally, reports have surfaced that, in his thirties, Moore was barred from certain local shopping malls because he would approach underage girls and try to strike up friendships. And, a retired police officer revealed how they were charged with keeping Moore away from high school cheerladers at sporting events when he was approaching middle age.

As a result, many Republican politicians have made public remarks about Moore and, almost without exception, they have said Moore should exit the face. The one prominent Republican who urged him to stay in and hopes he will win is Donald Trump. Moore has vowed now to quit no matter what.

Ten or twenty years ago, Moore would be disgraced out of this race by now. But these are not normal times. The GOP has a thin margin in the Senate, and if Moore loses that margin becomes thinner. Some Republicans are still backing Moore no matter what allegations surface.

The largest group that has stayed with Moore is the evangelical block. Some 60 percent of Alabamans say they are evangelicals, and many of them still support Moore. He is stridently theocratic, and the ideas and policies he espouses, if they came to pass, would turn the United States into a conservative Christian nation that would, in some ways, resemble theocracies like Iran.

In a surreal vote of support, some fundamentalist ministers in Alabama have said statements to the media like "I don't care if the women's charges are 100 percent true; we still need to vote for Roy Moore."

They're backing Moore because he's anti-LGBT, anti-choice, anti-minority, anti-equality, anti-science, and anti-progress.

Fundamentalists often make anti-LGBT comments about how "the gays," if granted equal rights, would openly prey on children or try to "convert" them to homosexuality. So in their warped minds, they're voting for Moore to "protect" them, their society, and their children from forced conversion by militant gays and lesbians.

It takes a special kind of hypocrisy to back a pedophile like Roy Moore because you want to preserve "values." When you're embracing evil to protect yourself against an imaginary evil, you have become so deluded you've lost all sense of reality.

You're throwing away all your values to protect values. It is, of course, absurd.