UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph
By Tom Chivers
All right, a few slightly more considered thoughts on Cardinal Keith O’Brien, after having got my cheap-shot Christopher Hitchens quote out of the way a little while ago.
Some commentators have pointed out that doing something, repenting, and then criticising it in future does not necessarily make one a hypocrite: people can change their minds, and everyone struggles to live up to their own standards, of course. Lots of people might, for instance, warn us of the dangers of smoking or drugs, but struggle every day with their own addiction, and sometimes lapse. You could even suggest that their experience of the matter makes their voice more powerful, their story more real.
And as one commenter underneath my post put it, sarcastically: “Let’s all condemn those parents who try to teach their children that swearing, lying, cheating, bullying etc are wrong – and have some time in the last 30 years failed to maintain the standard themselves.” It’s true, we wouldn’t necessarily condemn such a parent. But there are important differences.
For a start, the “sinner that repenteth” defence falls down if you’ve kept your “sins” a secret. An ex-smoker warning us of the dangers of smoking is fine – but an ex-smoker who told us that smokers were nasty black-lunged cancer-spreaders but had led us to believe, through commission or omission, that he had never touched a cigarette, would get a few raised eyebrows. A Lefty education minister who sent her kids to private school might be OK, but if she told us that sending your kids to private school is terrible while not telling us where she’d sent her own (even if they are now grown up) would be rightly castigated. A mum who told her kids not to swear and pretended she’d never so much as said “damn” would lose credibility if a child found her effing and blinding at a cold-caller.
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