David McElroy

When you see an actor in a movie or on a TV show, you know that the person is acting. You don’t expect that the lines he says reflect what he is in real life. What you probably don’t know is that you should assume the same thing about politicians.

I was reminded of this earlier today when a frustrated friend sent me a link to a story about a married Republican state legislator in Ohio who was found drunk with a young stripper and charged with DUI. The legislator is Rep. Robert Mecklenborg, who has a history of backing strong “family values” legislation that plays well with the GOP voter base. My friend is originally from Germany, and she gets frustrated with American politics at time. Her comment today:

“This is sad. Why are some thinking they are so above the standards they impose on others?”

I don’t get outraged by these incidents and haven’t in years. It hadn’t really occurred to me until today why that’s true. The people who are outraged at such hypocrisy assume that the things politicians say represent something about what they really believe and think. I know better. I know that the delivery of their lines on a political stage has almost nothing to do with how they live their lives.

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Molly and her sister showed up outside my house — along with their mother — several years ago. I don’t know where they were from, but they were all skittish enough that I assume the mother was a stray. One day, the mother cat disappeared, leaving just two bewildered kittens mewing on my porch.

 The picture on the top of the three to the right is the only one I have of the kittens with their mother, because I couldn’t get close enough to get anything better than this. When she disappeared, I didn’t know what to do, because the kittens wouldn’t even let me get close to them. Unfortunately, it was the time of year that it was starting to get cold outside. (You’ll notice a Halloween pumpkin at the bottom of the picture with their mother.)

I started feeding the kittens quickly, but I really started to get concerned when the mother didn’t return for several days. On the night when it was going to be the first freeze of the season around here, I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to try to catch them.

I’d like to say it was easy, but it was very difficult. I was able to lure them with food. I grabbed one of them while she was eating, but the other took off. (They look so much alike that I don’t know now which I caught first.) After a lot of luring and stealth, I caught the second one, but I ended up bloodied by pretty little teeth and claws.

The two kittens were pretty much identical except for the width of the white strip on their noses. Molly has a wide white vertical strip. Her sister, Bessie, has a narrow vertical strip. They were both small, but their mother was tiny, too. Even as adults, Molly and Bessie weigh only 5 pounds each.

I expected to find homes for them quickly and be out of the business of fostering kittens. After all, I already had enough of my own. I certainly wasn’t going to take it two more.

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It’s a story that always produces outrage. Police see a couple of kids with a lemonade stand and shut them down because they don’t have a business license. The news stories make it clear that the police are jerks and that the poor kids are being victimized. Readers and viewers are outraged. Then we wait until the next time it happens and do the same story all over again.

The latest example of the predictable story is in Georgia. A couple of girls opened a lemonade stand to raise money to finance a trip to a theme park. Police shut them down because they didn’t have business licenses that would have cost $180 for the year. People are outraged. Again.

I have sympathy for the kids. I really do. But what I’d like to know is why stories such as this don’t remind us of the flip side. Obviously, it’s unreasonable to think that kids should have to have a city’s permission to sell lemonade, but isn’t it just as obvious that nobody should need government permission to conduct business? The only people whose permission you should need are your customers — and they vote with their purchases.

I’m glad that stories such as this one get attention, but I wish people would draw a different lesson. It’s not that kids need to be exempt from draconian, stupid laws. It’s that the draconian, stupid laws need to go away.