( – promoted by lowkell)
The recent conviction of former Republican governor Bob McDonnell on corruption and influence-peddling charges illustrates just how empty are Republican claims to be the party of morality.
In the Republican mind, “morality” refers only to individual sexual behavior. Republicans believe homosexuality is immoral; so is sex outside of marriage, unmarried women having children, divorce, abortion, and – in the minds of some Republicans – contraception is immoral.
Meanwhile, Republicans have no problems with rampant public immorality found in fraudulent accounting, stock manipulation, insider trading, financial conflicts of interest, bribery of public officials, and exorbitant pay to top executives.
Read Bob McDonnell’s 1989 “master’s thesis” written while he was a graduate student at Pat Robertson’s evangelical university. McDonnell laid out a 15-point plan by which Republicans could “correct the conventional folklore about the separation of church and state.” McDonnell used his thesis to rail against working women and “feminists” as “detrimental” to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.” He attacked a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples as being “illogical.”
Republicans and McDonnell are right about one thing: There really is moral rot in America. But the rot is not in private behavior that is no one else’s business. The rot is in the public behavior of people at or near the top.
We are treated to Republican legislators pushing laws to restrict private behavior in the name of morality while the same Republicans oppose laws to regulate transgressions against public morality such as fraudulent accounting, stock manipulation, insider trading, financial conflicts of interest, bribery of public officials, and exorbitant pay to top executives. Bob McDonnell is a prime example of this empty and meaningless Republican definition of morality.
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