For Lauren Boebert and her appalling ‘Beetlejuice’ antics, the season of repentance is at hand
Lauren Boebert speaking July 13, 2023. Photo by Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson September 20, 2023
“Hypocrisy” is a misleading word.
In its narrow sense, it refers to when we’re inconsistent — when we say one thing but do another, or when we apply one standard to other people and a different one to ourselves. In this sense, noticing when we might be hypocritical can be a valuable practice in this season of introspection.
But when it’s applied to our public lives, the term often doesn’t capture what’s really going on from an ethical, psychological and moral point of view.
Case in point: U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert.
Now, everyone who follows politics knows that Boebert is messy. It’s part of her brand: catcalling the president, owning the libs, trolling everybody. It’s a disgusting feature of contemporary politics that this kind of vulgarity wins elections, but that’s the world we live in.
But Boebert’s latest scandal is more than messy: It’s shocking. At a public, family-friendly event — the musical Beetlejuice — Boebert and her new boyfriend were ejected from the theater because they were being disruptive, vaping (what substance, we don’t know), and, worst of all, groping one another in a sexual way, with children sitting right nearby.
Boebert denied all of this at first, but then the surveillance footage was released, showing her doing exactly those things.
On one level, sure, this is hypocrisy. Boebert preaches conservative values, yet here she is flaunting those very values. She says that books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes on library shelves promote “the sexualization of our children”; she accuses a public servant who happens to be transgender of “grooming” children; she warns “all the drag queens out there: Stay away from the children in Colorado’s Third District!” (and three months later a terrorist shoots up a gay bar in that very district). Yet she herself engages in sexual petting in front of children.
But this isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s part of a scientifically documented fact that the people who are the most loudly homophobic, transphobic, and sex-phobic are often the ones with the biggest sexual hang-ups. “Sometimes people are threatened by gays and lesbians because they are fearing their own impulses, in a sense they “doth protest too much,” in the words of one study’s co-author.
We know these stories, because they are legion — there are pages and pages of examples. The homophobic pastors who are revealed to be shtupping male congregants, massage therapists or sex workers. The “family values” politicians who turn out to be adulterers, or sexual predators, or closeted gays cruising in airport bathrooms. “Conservative” parents like the reality show stars the Duggars who turn out to be serial sexual abusers. And of course, the horrors of the Catholic Church.
To be clear, I’m not referring to people with some religious qualms or moral questions about sexuality and gender. I mean the people who make fears about sex and gender the center of their religious and civic lives, who crusade endlessly for “traditional values” or “protecting children,” who join in moral panics about sex trafficking or trans kids – people like Boebert.
These people aren’t just hypocrites — they are unhealthily obsessed with sex, and they are projecting that unhealthy sexuality onto others. They regard sexuality as something dangerous, something to be repressed, because that is how they experience it. And then, as Michel Foucault observed, in that very act of repression, they create more taboo, more tension, more obsession. They think that other people are sexually immoral because they are sexually immoral.
Look, I’ve lived as an out gay man for over 20 years. In my younger days, I led a full, pleasure-filled and adventurous sexual life that I’m sure would scandalize many traditionalists. But I would never in a million years grope a sexual partner in a theater where kids are around. That is disgusting.
Do you see the difference? It’s not the ways in which we are intimate with one another that have moral value; it’s the ethical approach we take to intimacy as a whole. Is there consent? Is the act of intimacy beneficial to all parties involved? Is it nourishing and safe, or are there risks of objectification, addiction or exploitation? These are the kinds of ethical questions that ought to attend an exploration of healthy sexuality — and ironically, I find that they are asked more frequently and with more care in “alternative” sexual contexts than in traditional ones.
But in religious circles, Jewish and Christian alike, we’ve long been confused about the values in play. Two verses in the Hebrew Bible and five more in the New Testament are sometimes elevated above hundreds of moral teachings about honesty, holiness, compassion, empathy and love. Religious traditionalists blow off “Do not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” but refuse to bake a cupcake with rainbow frosting on it.
This isn’t mere hypocrisy. It’s a distortion of ethical values that stems, I think, from an unhealthy relationship to one’s own sexual self — and for religious people, a confusion about what matters most to God — and a projection of that self-loathing onto others.
This is how I understand Lauren Boebert. Anyone who would engage in sexual acts in the presence of children — in public, no less — has some serious teshuva to do, whether in a synagogue on Yom Kippur, in church, or on a therapist’s couch. They certainly should not be holding public office, or opining in public on matters of sexuality and gender. More than anything, they need help.
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