Moral Hypocrisy and an Ex-State Senator

Moral hypocrisy is something pretty much everyone grapples with in at least some minor way fairly frequently. People often manage to justify actions that are at odds with their own attitudes and morals. Moral hypocrisy is usually defined as a motivation to seem moral while failing to actually act in a moral way. It’s also been described as avoiding the “cost” of being moral in situations where being immoral provides a kind of easy way out, such as cutting a line. Generally speaking, people generally consider themselves to be moral and and will often advertise that sentiment in what they say. There is, however, often a decent chance that people might behave in a contradictory way if there is some kind of benefit to them. Furthermore, another phenomenon of moral hypocrisy is that people might perceive the same behavior in other people as immoral while continuing to engage in it themselves.

While the world of American politics is a massive black hole of moral hypocrisy right now, the main example I decided to discuss here comes from a few years ago. I only just learned about this figure, so while he is not news, he was news to me and the story certainly stands out. This is former Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey.

So aside from not looking like the nicest person, he is an interesting example of moral hypocrisy. His attitudes were never, in my opinion, particularly moral. During his time in office, his main claims to fame were voting on measures that allowed discrimination against gay and transgender people in addition to taking hard stances against gun control and abortion. However in his extremely discriminatory and prejudiced policies toward transgender people in particular, his justification was that he wanted to “protect children.” Now regardless of the complete lack of logic in that line of reasoning, an extremely stark moral hypocrisy came into play in 2017 when he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of child sex trafficking and child pornography. This is as far from protecting children as any person can possibly get, and as such he is currently serving a 15 year prison sentence. While he claimed to have been protecting children with the policies he supported, he certainly was not with any of his actions.