Read Full Article In Newsweek
Could the seemingly inexhaustible supply of high-profile hypocrites reflect the fact that the media cover the George Rekers of the world and not your philandering, church-deacon neighbor? In a word, no. They are worse than the rest of us. There really is something about power that stokes hypocrisy, which is the practice of engaging in behavior that you condemn in others.
According to new research in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, there is a direct causal connection between power and hypocrisy‚Äîor between power and what the scientists unflinchingly call “sanctimony combined with lechery and gluttony.”
A century ago, the famous German medical doctor Magnus Hirschfeld wrote about hypocritical political leaders in Germany who stridently supported the German Paragraph 175 law against homosexuality while they were simultaneously engaging in homosexual acts themselves. Hirschfeld notes that Joseph Sadger came to the conviction “that all people, including those appearing most normal in their sex life, even those who condemn Uranism most severely, are never without a large or small strain of homosexuality.” Hirschfeld also made the following observations in his book nearly a century ago:
See my blog post “Hirschfeld on gay hypocrites a century ago,” thomaskraemer.blogspot.com posted 6/24/10