Double Standards

My dad, who I dearly loved despite our years of father-son conflict, operated--and raised me--on the unfortunate but all too common principle of "don't do as I do, do as I say." This surely must be one of the most counterproductive, confusing, and negative of all ways to raise a child. Dad meant well but it had a lasting effect on my life, and on our relationship.

The double standard says, loudly and clearly, that what is perfectly all right for me to do is not perfectly all right for you to do. Our entire society, actually, operates on this same principle, and the very foundations of hypocrisy are, in fact, built on it.

Logic and the double standard are largely anathema to one another. Politics traditionally flaunts logic and is based on the principles of the double standard; dictators and despots make it a fundamental part of their regimes. Politicians repeatedly demonstrate the double standard of proclaiming themselves self-appointed guardians of public morals while frequently showing up in the tabloids after being caught (often literally), with their pants down.

Our recent elections upheld the finest traditions of political double standards. Surely I can't be the only one absolutely dumbfounded to hear Tea Party types demanding to get the government out of our lives while they drive on federally funded highways to stop at the bank to cash their social security checks on the way to a doctor's appointment paid for by Medicare. Obviously the message is: feel free to vehemently oppose federal programs while taking full advantage of them.

Observing the approach the mid-term elections with the horror of watching a train wreck, I simply could not and cannot understand how any intelligent human being can hold the dumbfoundingly cretinous pronouncements by the likes of Nevada's Sharon Angle, or the modern-day Iago, Sarah Palin--whose grasp of reality is even more tenuous than mine. She has made a cottage industry of puffings and spouting "just us workin' folks" homilies and talks of lipstick on pigs and momma bears protecting their cubs while railing against a health program designed to protect women and children--with utter disgust and in anything but utter contempt.

And Sarah, from whom I'm sure we will be hearing quite a bit as the 2012 elections approach, is not alone applying the double standard of claiming to be just like you and me while raking in millions in book sales and speaking fees.

Nowhere is the double standard more evident than in the attitudes of heterosexuals toward homosexuals. To walk through a park and see a heterosexual couple all but fornicating on a park bench or a lawn, trying very hard to swallow one another's tongues, or clasping one another in a fervent embrace in the middle of a sidewalk full of people is perfectly natural. But two men holding hands in public is still generally viewed with mild-to-major shock in most areas of the country.

So I shall end this little morality tale with what I frankly consider the epitome of a double standard. President Obama was elected partly because he got a majority of the GLBTQ vote by vowing to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He has spoken frequently and with great conviction on the fact that it is wrong, and promised its repeal. He has the power, as chief executive, to end this egregious policy with the stroke of a pen. Yet for all the nobility of his statements, he backs the Justice Department's blocking of the law's repeal and insists it be left to a congress ruled by some of the finest Puritanical minds of the 16th century. While I am a lifelong Democrat and an unregenerate liberal, and while there are undoubtedly many reasons for the President's apparent sell-out, I do not know what they are, nor do I care. I feel I have been lied to by someone I trusted. It is not a pleasant feeling.

Double standards, anyone?

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