Is Josh Duggar the Biggest Family-Values Hypocrite Ever? Not Even Close

“I have been the biggest hypocrite ever,” Josh Duggar wrote, in a confessional statement he later took down. Indeed, it has been a tough summer for the former reality TV star and executive director of the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm, now exposed as a former child molester, porn addict, and Ashley Madison-using adulterer.

But biggest hypocrite ever?  Not sure about that one.

What about megachurch Bishop Eddie Long, who, while preaching against homosexuality, sexually abused at least three teenage boys in his charge?

And what about megachurch pastor Ted Haggard who, while likewise preaching against homosexuality and drug use, bought crystal meth and had sex with a male escort/masseur for three years? Or George Rekers, who, while preaching similarly, was caught with a rentboy on vacation in the Caribbean?a

For that matter, what about the entire Catholic Church hierarchy, which, while preaching against homosexuality, covered up the systemic sexual abuse of thousands of boys in Europe and America—and still maintains a “gay mafia” in the Vatican today?

How about John Paulk, poster child for the Ex-Gay movement, caught frequenting a well-known Washington, D.C., gay bar?

Or self-hating senator Larry Craig, who tap-tap-tapped his way into a gay sex sting operation in a Minneapolis airport? Or David Vitter? Or Henry Hyde? Or Mark Foley? Or Bob Livingston?

Maybe if these people took their boots off my neck, I’d be able to squeeze out a laugh.

Or – flashback time – televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who publicly shamed fellow tellies Jim Bakker and Marvin Gorman for their infidelities, until Gorman turned around and exposed Swaggart’s own affairs, which he tearfully confessed on national television?

And maybe we could give a group hypocrisy award to pastors Jack Schaap (Hammond, Indiana), David Loveless (Orlando), Grant Storms (New Orleans), Isaac Hunter (Orlando), Larry Durant (Sumter, South Carolina), Sam Hinn (Stanford, Florida), Paul Barnes (Douglas County, Colorado), Lonnie Latham (Tulsa), Earl Paulk (Decatur, Georgia), Joe Barron (near Dallas), Michael Hintz (Des Moines), Todd Bentley (Lakeland, Florida), and Tony Alamo (Arkansas), all of whom were caught with men, women, boys, or girls, and forced to resign in the last decade.

And these are just the sex scandals—I don’t have enough space to include the financial scandals, abuse scandals, and fraud scandals that have bedeviled right-wing Christian churches and organizations over the last few years.

It’s tempting to minimize these stories. They’re so familiar by now that surely the default assumption must be that the anti-gay crusader is probably closeted and gay, and the pro-family crusader is probably on Ashley Madison.

Which makes perfect sense, psychologically. If you’re wrestling with a particular demon, it’s easy to see that wrestling as the most important thing in the world. Philandering family-values types are out there screaming because ultimately, they’re screaming at themselves.

So it’s not surprising that for many of us, there’s a profoundly gleeful schadenfreudewhen hypocrites are exposed. (Along withprofound concern for the LGBT people in repressive regimes whose lives are now in danger thanks to the Ashley Madison hack.) Women, progressives, and queers have had to sit and listen to the likes of Duggar, Huckabee, Santorum, and Fischer talk about us, as if the outright lies they spread about our lives are somehow deserving of deference. So you can’t blame us for smiling when they take a fall.

But here are two reasons to get hopping mad instead.