The River of Hypocrisy Runs Wide and Deep : The Smith case is remarkable, too, for its rank immorality.

As the last guy at any dinner party to strenuously oppose the death penalty, I’m happy that Susan Smith’s life was spared. But what would have happened if the authorities had caught someone fitting the description of the black man whom she initially accused of kidnaping her babies?

Remember him--the man described so tearfully by Smith during nine days of press conferences? Her story then, as summarized in USA Today: “Staring down the barrel of a gun, Susan Smith pleaded with the carjacker to let her children out of the car. But the thug sped away . . . taking with him Smith’s young sons. . . . And a family prays . . . .”

Leading the prayers, according to the newspaper, was Beverly Russell, 47, the boys’ step-grandfather who said, “That’s what we need the country to do.” It turned out that what Russell needed to do was something more, which was to come clean about his sexual relationship with his stepdaughter that began with fondling and kissing when she was 15 and continued into an adulterous affair right up to a few months before the boys were drowned.

Russell, a prominent leader of the South Carolina Republican Party and the local Christian Coalition, knew that Smith was not the sweet innocent first presented to the media because he had stolen her innocence. When she was only 6, her natural father killed himself over a messy divorce and Russell’s marriage to Smith’s mother. At the age of 13, Smith attempted suicide, and while aware of her fragile mental state, Russell began his sexual advances two years later. At 17, Smith attempted suicide again. Russell claims that he held off until Smith was married before escalating this sick sexual liaison.

Evidently, he felt no conflict being a child molester and adulterer while campaigning for Pat Robertson and working for the Christian Coalition. Until he got caught: “Of course, had I known at that time what the result of my sin would be I would have mustered the strength to behave according to my responsibility.”

This from a man who paraded around Union, S.C., as the keeper of everyone else’s moral virtue. Such hypocrisy is not new, but it gives the lie to those on the right who insist that everything would be hunky-dory if only we could return to pre-1960s small-town values. Russell was as home-grown as they get and hardly a product of what Newt Gingrich calls the “calculated effort by culture elites to discredit this civilization and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility.” The only cultural elite that influenced Russell was a staunchly conservative one. The hippies didn’t make him do it.

What we see here is the other side of the Norman Rockwell painting that was always there.

“There is a corruption of morals and a culture of racism that runs deep here,” said McElroy Hughes, a minister and the head of the local NAACP, “and no one has ever told the truth about it.”

The dark side was hidden until out-of-town reporters began investigating. Russell only confessed his own “guilt” during the penalty phase of the trial, when, sanctimonious to the end, he pleaded for Smith’s life: “We can’t even get through the grieving process for Michael and Alex, we’re so focused on saving Susan’s life.”

If some poor sap had been caught and convicted because Smith had stuck to her story, would Russell have pleaded for that young man’s life? Not likely, given the Christian right’s strong support of the death penalty. But things change when your lover/stepdaughter is the killer.

Our mythical carjacker would have been hanged under the newly enacted federal law that the family values conservatives pushed through Congress. And anyone who might have argued that the black carjacker had been molested as a child and therefore should be judged less harshly would have been dismissed as a moral leper or worse, a liberal. Unfortunately for right-wing theology, the killer was a churchgoing Southern white Protestant raised by the successful stockbroker son of a former senator and governor.

Ironically, Russell was in the news three weeks before the drownings; the Federal Election Commission was investigating his use of the tax-exempt Christian Coalition in Pat Robertson’s 1992 presidential campaign. Obviously, Robertson is not responsible for Russell’s heinous deeds. But they do call into question Robertson’s inanely simple bromides for what ails our society.

Let’s learn from this that the river of madness in this country runs deep and wide, and that the ones who claim the moral high ground may easily be swept along in its wild current.