Our topic for today is hypocrisy. The scene is – where else? – Congress.
This week the House of Representatives voted 237-189 to make it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman who has been pregnant more than 20 weeks. Victory for the anti-choice forces. One of whom was apparently very interested in maintaining all options when he thought his own girlfriend was expecting.
Meet Tim Murphy, a Republican congressman from the Pittsburgh suburbs who has a doctorate in psychology and is the co-author of a couple of books with titles like “Overcoming Passive-Aggression.” He’s married but – prodded by information revealed at his lover’s divorce trial – he admits having strayed with another psychologist.
Murphy is a co-sponsor of the anti-abortion bill. At about the same time it was passing, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a note his mistress had texted in January, complaining about the way he kept putting pro-life messages on his Facebook page “when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week. …”
Whoops. This is not actually a unique story. There’s a history of lawmakers who are eager to restrict abortions in every case not involving their own personal sex life.