Hypocrisy has had a high profile on my blog this summer, especially as it relates to the emerging attitudes of young people.

One of the current hypocrisy poster boys is Senator John Ensign, who really drove home what is acceptable and not acceptable in the prevailing attitudes of those who claim the moral high ground.

The Senator, who roundly condemned then-President Clinton’s sexual peccadillo and subsequent lying to a grand jury, said, “I haven’t done anything legally wrong.” (My emphasis.)

Which mean that if Clinton had admitted screwing around with Monica Lewinsky it would have made it a “distraction” (Ensign’s term for what he did.) as opposed to the felony created by lying.

Ensign is prominent member of the Promise Keepers leadership, which lists seven basic tenets, the third being, “A Promise Keeper is committed to practicing spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity” and the fourth, “A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection and Biblical values.”

Ensign violated both and compounded the violations by having his parents pay off his mistress.

These don’t count, since Promise Keepers isn’t a legal entity and, obviously, lying to your followers and constituency isn’t illegal—just unethical and immoral.

What kids will absorb is that there are no real repercussions; Ensign still holds his Congressional seat, will probably win reelection, hasn’t changed his role in Promise Keepers, and is still cheered when he gives a speech. And if reporters dare to raise additional questions, his response is “I’ve said everything I was going to say about that.”

We may ring our hands and lament the lack of accountability of society in general and the Millennials in particular, but we don’t have to look very far to find the cause.

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(Today continues a conversation initiated last Thursday and added to yesterday.)

Everybody lies about sex. Those who aren’t getting any say they are and those who are getting it where they shouldn’t deny it.

Governor Mark Sanford followed the same path of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth (the first woman) and many more.

But you know what?

I don’t care. At least, not about the sex—or even the lies. Even the lies under oath, because I don’t believe that an oath is going to change someone’s attitude about admitting something they don’t want to admit, it just adds another layer to the lie.

As Becky Robinson pointed out in her comment I could have just as easily used the Evangelical community—Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman, Jim Bakker, Lonnie Latham, Earl Paulk, Paul Crouch, Douglas Goodman, Frank Houston, etc., etc., etc. and, of course, the Catholic Church.

Dan Erwin made two very salient points.

In his first comment he said, “If you reframe the context from leader to bureaucrat, then the ethical expectations change.”

Amen, Dan. To assume that an elected official or any person-out-front automatically possesses all the sterling qualities of a “leader” as defined by the media, pundits and leadership industry has no basis in fact.

The second point that hit me was, “The notion of “standards” etc. is often a set-up for failure.”

This is getting closer to what angers me so much.

Not the sex, not the lies, but the standards.

Standards that they defined, preached and worked so hard to shove down everyone’s throat—standards that not one of them has even come close to practicing.

Mark Sanford voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment citing a need for “moral legitimacy” as his reason. Now he cites the Bible and the story of David and Bathsheba as his reason for not resigning.

As to the apologies, are they for the action or for getting caught? Americans are so focused on the sex and accept the apologies so readily that the hypocrisy becomes mere background noise.

It’s the Richard Nixon mentality all over again. As Nixon said in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,”

The reigning slogan these days for too many “leaders” seems to be “do as I say, not as I do,” which both angers and confuses their followers.

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Dan also said, “No question but what they’re hypocrites…of the worst kind. They made claims they didn’t follow through on. However, the issue parents (and grandparents, too) have to deal with is the education of your children.”

We’ll explore Dan’s thoughts and personal example of this in the next Leadership’s Future on Thursday. Please join us.

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Thursday I wrote about today’s excessive hypocrisy using, among other examples, Senator John Ensign.

Like most bloggers, I post ahead, so that I wasn’t able to include South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

Today I want to offer up some quotes from him and tomorrow I’m going to address the subjects brought up by Dan Erwin and Becky Robinson in the comments on Thursday’s post.

“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”

“I think it would be much better for the country and for him [Livingston] personally (to resign). I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.”

“What I find interesting is the story of David, and the way in which he fell mightily—fell in very, very significant ways, but then picked up the pieces and built from there.” (King David, who slept with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, had the husband killed, married the widow, but continued to ‘lead’.)

“Too many people in government seem to think they are above regular folks, and I said I would expect humility in the way each member of my team served—that they would recognize that the taxpayer is boss.”

“We as a party want to hold ourselves to high standards, period,”

I hope you’ll come back tomorrow as this conversation continues.

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