Hypocrisy/Letter to the Editor

We now learn that 95 percent of us have had premarital sex (IR, Dec. 20). Compare that with the roughly 27 percent of us that self-identify as evangelical Christians and one detects an obvious overlap.Not long ago I read that Oklahoma — a prominent “Bible Belt” state — has the highest divorce rate in America.In just the past year, two conservative culture warriors were “outed” by their own behavior — one a publicly anti-gay “Family Values” Republican congressman caught soliciting underage boys; the other the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the epitome of institutional homophobia in America, now undergoing spirituality-based homosexual “deprogramming.”It all makes you wonder how many “pro-life” women have surreptitiously had abortions.So then, why do conservative evangelicals still feel entitled to legislate morality for the rest of us vis-à-vis South Dakota’s recently defeated abortion criminalization statute, Kansas’ and Pennsylvania’s attempts to outlaw science in science classrooms, proposed “defense of marriage” (whose marriage was under attack?) constitutional amendments, and provably inadequate “abstinence-only” federal educational edicts.I, for one, think it’s about time these folks get their own house in order before trying to legislate their morality on the rest of us.W. Craig Heymann1618 Lyndale