In comparing Republican reactions to the Larry Craig and David Vitter scandals, Glenn Greenwald makes a great point, one that has been made many times but bears repeating.

The only kind of “morality” that this [right-wing] movement knows or embraces is politically exploitative, cost-free morality. That is why the national Republican Party rails endlessly against homosexuality and is virtually mute about divorce and adultery: because anti-gay moralism costs virtually all of its supporters nothing (since that is a moral prohibition that does not constrain them), while heterosexual moral deviations — from divorce to adultery to sex outside of marriage — are rampant among the Values Voters faithful and thus removed from the realm of condemnation. Hence we have scads of people sitting around opposing same-sex marriage because of their professed belief in “Traditional Marriage” while their “third husbands” and multiple step-children and live-in girlfriends sit next to them on the couch.

They’re all willing to cheer on the “rules of traditional marriage” which do not impose on them in any way (marriage must have a man and a woman — no problem there). But no “Family Values” politician could possibly survive politically by seeking to enshrine with the force of law all of the other equally important prongs of “Traditional Marriage” (all of that dreary, outdated “until death do us part” business which would deny the “right” for Values Voters to dump their wives and move on to the “next wife” when the mood strikes, or remain shacked up with their various girlfriends and the like).

In other words, it’s always easy to demonize The Other.