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Married ‘Christian conservative’ congressman caught making out with staffer

So?

That's between him, the staffer and his family...no one else's business.

I would not hesitate for one second to vote for this guy - assuming he was the candidate closest to my positions on the issues.

He could have 100 mistresses...none of my business...or the voters.

I feel the same way. This is between him and his wife. I didn't care when it came out that Clinton liked ladies on the side either. It's called "personal life" for a reason.
 
I'm a conservative. I never set myself to a higher level of morality nor has any conservative I know. It's all about taking care of yourself and keeping government to a minimum.

Your personal experience means nothing. Your leaders have set a level of morality that is clearly unreachable - even by them. They have set the standard through their support of homophobic laws, attacks of women's rights and support of socially conservative governments in other countries. Their constituents who are as flawed as the rest of us have endorsed the aforementioned standards and time and time again we see that the conservative movement isn't ready to walk the walk just talk the talk.
 
Your personal experience means nothing. Your leaders have set a level of morality that is clearly unreachable - even by them. They have set the standard through their support of homophobic laws, attacks of women's rights and support of socially conservative governments in other countries. Their constituents who are as flawed as the rest of us have endorsed the aforementioned standards and time and time again we see that the conservative movement isn't ready to walk the walk just talk the talk.

I don't have any "leaders".
 
Your leaders have set a level of morality that is clearly unreachable - even by them.

If this were a fair statement, then it wouldn't be newsworthy everytime such a leader is caught violating his standards. That such stories are scarce enough to make the news puts the lie to your suggestion that most conservatives routinely violate your own standards.

Perhaps, being on the wrong, you've been raised to hold such moral standards in abject contempt, and to make no personal effort to live by such standards. This would surely account for your inability to grasp that many of us have been raised differently, to value such standards, and to aspire to live our lives according to them; and that although we all fall a but short once in a while, most of us succeed most of the time.
 
If this were a fair statement, then it wouldn't be newsworthy everytime such a leader is caught violating his standards.

You're misunderstanding why the articles are newsworthy. Car crashes happen often. Every single night, many are reported on across the country because they had something about them which made them stand out. It doesn't mean that the rest of the country is driving safely. It means there are thousands that go unreported. It's a given that most of the population has affairs, however - when the person caught having the affair is a politician that represents people against that sort of thing, it becomes something newsworthy. Socially liberal but economically conservatives don't make the news after affairs.

Luck also plays a big part in which get chosen and which don't. Thad Viers and David Dreier aren't news even though they both had their own scandals recently. John Edwards was brought down by extramarital affairs and his hypocritical family man image. Tim Mahoney wasn't. John Edwards painted himself as a big family man, the somewhat country conservative boy with a liberal streak. The everyday family man who doesn't fart in front of his family. He turned out to be full of ****.
 
First of all, I am a Christian before I am a liberal. I get so frustrated with many of my Christian brothers and sisters on the right who have this self righteous attitude towards others. It makes us all look like hypocrites. If all of us open that closet a little wider to the public, it will reveal that we are as flawed as any other individual.

Again, being flawed is different than knowing right from wrong and rejecting what is right for what is wrong. Telling people what's right and what's wrong isn't self righteousness, thinking yourself, and yourself alone the moral arbiter, is.
 
I think hypocrisy tends to be more jarring with religious conservatives, simply because when they do fail on a personal level, it's such a marked departure from what they preach.

I think we can agree on that. As a Christian, a little voice in me is filled with glee when these people are called out, because I'm skeptical that if someone is using religion to sell a political career that he's, in fact, a believer. If I see "Vote for... " and "Christian" in the same political ad it's actually a turn off for me, and as a resident of Mississippi I see it quite a bit. I mean, conservatives can say what they want about Jimmy Carter as POTUS, but no one to my knowledge has ever been able to impugn his integrity, and he didn't wear his religion on his sleeve.
 
I like that...neither do I.

IMO, politicians are there to follow my instructions, not the other way around.

Absolutely.

The use of the word "leaders" in response to a post hedoesn't like as a failed attempt to get me to talk about other people when my post was only about myself is a knee-jerk and utterly failed tactic.
 
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