The commandment that comes with an asterisk

Something occurs to me, reading headlines about teabag wingnuts and their consistently outrageous claims about President Obama.

These allegations are obviously lies. Sure, some of these people are truly around the bend -- especially those who have access to little more than a keyboard, and dutifully forward the wacky reforwarded e-mails they get from equally confused, pathetic people such as themselves. They sometimes don't know better, by virtue of insufficient education, low IQ, and/or social insulation. Sometimes they do know better, deep down, but it's easier to remain ignorant.

But then you have the people who promulgate this garbage.
They are professional spinmeisters whose only purpose in creating these stories is to amass power. Many of them hide behind Judeo-Christian religion as an additional means of bashing those they don't like (atheists and Muslims). On some level, they genuinely believe in a higher power and believe that they are acting in obedience to it. But they have to know that the stuff they're spreading around the internet is a lie. So how on earth do they evade that commandment that says "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?" Libel laws they can easily duck, since libel is defined very narrowly as it is codified into civil law. But in a religious system that says you're committing adultery if you even think about being attracted to someone you're not married to, how would one justify the manufacture of out and out lies regarding not only the actions, but the motivations of your political opponents?

With the adultery question, you have the oft-used device of "confessing" to personal weakness and asking for forgiveness. But I've noticed that when the few people (like Frank Schaeffer) who wise up about their misdeeds change their minds and admit what they've been up to, they more often than not renounce THE WHOLE THING. The company they kept, the belief system they embraced, going all the way back to their formative years and families. The "sinners" who confess adultery, on the other hand, renounce very little. Instead of saying "I've been raised in the dysfunctional incubator of fundamentalist Christianity, where hypocrisy is a way of life, and if I don't get completely out of there I'll just continue having affairs on the down-low," they simply spew out more of the same, attributing their screwups to a failure to sufficiently succumb to the brainwashing! Instead of "Yes, I'm gay, and since the Southern Baptist Convention and most Christian denominations condemn me for this, I'm outa there! Time to live my own life as an intelligent human of free will, and I doubt I'm displeasing God because more than likely there's no such thing ANYWAY," they give us "I've let down my family and my church and will dedicate the rest of my life praising God because only with his help can I overcome this blahblahblah."

So what it boils down to is the matter of honesty. The "apostates" recognize that the system that forbids lies actually incubates them! They get out, so that they can actually live more by the relevant commandments (the honesty and adultery ones in particular).

Why does hypocrisy continue to have such a stranglehold on fundamentalists?