The Loudest Voice in the Room Is Usually Hiding Something
An Op-Ed on Moral Hypocrisy in Conservative Public Life
Author Note
Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher, writer, and MBA graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.
There is a joke that writes itself every few months in American politics. A pastor spends twenty years preaching against pornography and turns up on a subscription list. A senator who built his career voting against gay rights gets caught soliciting men in an airport bathroom. A family-values congressman quietly pays for an abortion. An anti-trafficking crusader is arrested with child sexual abuse material on his laptop. We laugh, we shake our heads, we move on, and then it happens again the next month with a different name.
After enough rounds of this, a person starts to wonder whether something larger is at work than ordinary human weakness. Is there a reason the loudest moralizers keep getting caught doing the things they moralize against? I went looking for what psychologists actually know about this, and the answer turned out to be sharper and stranger than I expected.
Start with the easy part. The pattern is partly real. Benjamin Edelman (2009), an economist at Harvard Business School, once got hold of subscription data from a major paid pornography site and matched it to ZIP codes. Utah came in first. The states that scored highest on religiosity and traditional sexual values led the country in paying for online pornography, and subscriptions even dipped on Sundays in the most religious states, which tells you people were not abstaining so much as scheduling around church. Sociologists Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak (2014) later showed that counties packed with conservative Protestants have higher divorce rates than the national average, shaped partly by a culture that pushes young people into marriage before they are ready for it.
