Diamondeye wrote:
There's really nothing ridiculous about that at all. It's only "ridiculous" because the idea of anyone having religious convictions makes you uncomfortable. Part of the reason people hold convictions like this is because of the propensity of other people to question what goes on behind closed doors. Religious people know that people like you will take any excuse to assume they're hypocrites not adhering to their own standards, so they take steps to avoid such accusations. Pence is just more publicly visible than most.
You're trying to create a situation where it is equally objectionable for people to adhere to their own convictions or nor, and to both invite question of their behavior and take steps to avoid such questions. "I don't want any chance of being perceived as a hypocrite" is not pathological; what is pathological is the need to criticize it from either direction. If you're going to act like that, then people you disagree with should basically ignore any concerns you have since your real goal is obviously to avoid having your concerns addressed at all costs.
My objection with Pence isn't really about Christianity, it's the moralizer bullshit that arbitrarily assigns things to "right" and "wrong" categories and then declares that anything assigned to the "right" category must
always be done, and that anything assigned to "wrong" category can
never be done, and there are absolutely no exceptions, regardless of the consequences that may occur. In fact under this philosophy even considering the consequences of straying from the classifications is itself considered a moral lapse. The prohibition on being alone with women is just one chapter of Pence's political history which consists of one giant list of these things, where he allowed real harm to occur despite an effective solution being available simply because said solution offended some moral sensibility. Most prominent was how he allowed an AIDS epidemic to spread unchecked because it "sends the wrong message" for the government to make clean needles available to drug addicts.
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Seeing as how you're criticizing him for having a moral stance because you feel his moral stance is critical of others, yes, in this particular case you're being a hypocrite.
How is this hypocritical? People are free to criticize my moral stances, I'm not applying special rules to myself in this regard.