Hypocrisy or Natural Order of Things?
On a thread at Pharyngula (http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/abcs_of_pzm/), a commenter ("caerbannog") wrote a very interesting comment, ascribing the existence of the two described behaviors within a same person as hypocrisy. I believe, on the other hand, that the two behaviors are two sides of the same coin, both resulting from one's Strict Father upbringing. You decide. Here is the complete stolen story:
Heh heh… that reminds me of a trip we made last year to
visit some somewhat distant relatives. Said relatives are very rigid
fundamentalists; the father is a youth-minister and teacher at their church and
church-run school, and the daughters have been kept away from public schools
(both are enrolled at the church school). Even innocuous DVD titles such as "The
Little Mermaid" (objection: daughter fails to "honor" her father) and the "Harry
Potter" series are right out. The bookshelf in the den sports a bunch of
religious titles, including a few anti-evolution tomes and some of the "Left
Behind" books. The kids are not permitted to watch network television — even
"family-safe" shows — because the parents are concerned that the kids might see
some inappropriate commercials (daddy, what’s Viagra?). They do have a PC hooked up to a broadband internet connection, but it’s primarily dad’s toy; the kids
can use it only under direct adult supervision (which is a pretty sensible
policy no matter what your religious persuation). More about that PC below.Well, we ended up spending the night at their house, sleeping in the den. The next
morning, I awoke before anyone else did, and noting that the PC had been left on
overnight, I decided to kill a bit of time by surfing over to a few of my
favorite "subversive" web-sites.The first web-site I decided to visit was
"juancole.com". But as soon as I typed the letters "ju", the browser’s
autocomplete feature offered up "juicyboobs.com"! I soon realized that the
browser’s history buffer was just chock-full of all manner of XXX web-sites. In
fact, a large majority of the web-sites URL’s that popped up were of the XXX
variety, and some of them appeared to have embedded userid/password information.Very quickly, I realized that it would be in my interest to keep my distance
from that PC, so I shut down the browser and hunted up a day-old newspaper to
read instead.So, yes, a few letters typed into a URL bar can tell you more than
you’d ever want to know about the PC’s owner.Needless to say, I haven’t breathed so much as a word about this to anyone in my family. If dad wants to put down his Bible from time to time to visit a few racy web-sites when no one is looking, then that’s his business. But I just can’t help but think about the hypocrisy of it all.
It should also be noted that Larry Flynt didn’t get his start in a "sinful" place like Miami Beach, Hollywood, or Las Vegas. He got his start peddling hard-core porn in rural Ohio. And I wouldn’t be suprised if he sold his very first copy of Hustler to a religious fundamentalist.
