Inconsistent? Intolerant? Hypocritical? Human
If you breathe, thirst, hunger and are human, you will at some point in your life have a moment of hypocrisy. In fact, you will have many of them. It is not possible for those of us who don’t wear halos to be entirely consistent in our lives, and God understands that. Life is a learning process, and if we sprang out of our mothers’ wombs with fullyformed consciences programmed to make the right choices, we’d be insufferable. God made us imperfect to keep us interesting.
But having hypocritical lapses does not mean that you get to pass, unobserved and un-judged, through this vail of tears and laughter. If you do or say something that is diametrically opposed to what you pretend to believe, you should be criticized, perhaps demonized, even ostracized.
That, however, is a problem. For some reason, we’ve decided that it’s not nice to point out when people are being dishonest, self-serving and short of memory. You are probably getting tired with this long, philosophical preamble, so I’ll get to the point. Actually, there are a couple.
Point one: Joe Biden’s family is a mess. I know that I wrote a column a couple of years ago talking about how I admired him for being such a good father and a decent man and yadda yadda, he’s just our own Amtrak-loving curmudgeon. I wrote that column in the wake of his son Beau’s tragic death, and I meant every word of it then. I still mean every word, because no one will ever convince me that our former vice president was anything but a magnificent pater familias.
But now comes word that his surviving son Hunter, who is separated from but still legally married to his wife, Kathleen, is dating Beau’s widow, Hallie. The details are sketchy, and it’s possible that the timeline makes their relationship less offensive and jarring than it would appear at first glance, but papa Joe and mama Jill came out publicly to give their blessing to the arrangement.
Now, you could say that it’s none of our business how this former Second Family conducts itself when it’s no longer in office (even though the affair apparently started while Joe was still the veep). You could say that we have no right to judge grieving people. You could say I’m a bitter woman, which is what a bunch of ladies on Facebook called me for even suggesting that this was a problematic relationship. You could say a lot of things, and I would simply block you from Facebook assuming I’d been stupid enough to “friend” you in the first place.
But while you are saying these things, it is important that you also remember those vicious comments you made about Donald Trump being an adulterous pig, about his wife being an illegal alien strumpet, about his son being an autistic pseudo-orphan and about his daughter being a robotic sister wife. You cannot lash out at me, who considers Hunter and Hallie to be incredibly insensitive to the chaos and carnage they are creating for their children, while railing against our president and his relatives. I mean, you could. But you’d be a raging hypocrite.
Point two: Religious bigotry is religious bigotry is religious bigotry. Earlier this week, I wrote a column (in another paper) about how some Radnor residents opposed a bridge that Villanova University wanted to build across Lancaster Avenue. The reason they didn’t like the bridge is because it was going to be adorned with two massive crosses at either end. I complained that it seemed the push back had overtones of anti-Catholicism, especially where one of the critics said she didn’t want “crosses shoved down [her] throat.”
That last comment really angered me, so much that I used it several times in an interview I did on the topic on KYW radio.
Some people agreed with me that it reeked of religious bigotry. But I got a lot of emails telling me that I owed every Jew and Muslim in the Delaware Valley an apology because Catholics in particular and Christians in general were in the majority and weren’t the victims of discrimination since the 1800s (when the Know Nothings burned down our churches and killed a few of us for good measure).
I was told that the recent spate of hate crimes and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and the vicious treatment of ethnic minorities was much worse than anything my “people” had suffered. The vitriol was a bit surprising, but not entirely unexpected.
And then one of my friends sent me this in an email, and it brought things into clearer focus:
Like you,I am appalled by the anti-Jewish events going on in the nation and the desecration of Jewish headstones. The news coverage being given is deserved.
But what happened to the barely mentioned story of the desecration of Catholic headstones at Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Philadelphia? On the weekend it occurred, you may have barely seen/heard it if you stayed awake after being told by the media of the benefits of the soda tax for “universal” (which means catholic, ha) pre-school and the weather forecast.
And he was absolutely right. Hateful attacks on one person because of his or her religion (or skin color, or nationality) is a hateful attack on everyone who is “the other.” There is no difference between a swastika painted on a Jewish headstone and the desecration of the statue of the Virgin Mary. None.
Unfortunately, too many people create artificial categories of people who deserve the most protection, the most sympathy, the most tolerance. They do it with the randy children of former vice presidents, and they do it with religious “majorities” who are insensitive to the psychic harm they cause when forcing crosses down the throats of unsuspecting pedestrians.
I’m becoming increasingly disgusted with the way people have cauterized the raw parts of their brains, the parts that do the honest and most painful reasoning, to get rid of any inconsistency that makes their life uncomfortable. Yes, Hunter Biden is cheating on his wife with his sister-in-law. but daddy says it’s okay, so it’s okay because we love daddy, but Donald Trump is an orange-haired Blue Beard (“Orange Beard?”) who runs through women like he runs through self-tanner.
Yes, Catholics are being targeted, but we won’t admit it because they have such an annoying religion, but we must be vigilant when Jews, Muslims and all other minority groups are being threatened. es, it’s a little inconsistent, but that’s all a part of being human. And imperfect. And tolerant. And compassionate. And hypocrites.