You're now deputized into the sex police

Here's a great comment from a Metafilter thread about Newt Gingrich's affair:

he amazing thing is that right wing anti-conservative family values movement has managed to turn the left wing into sex police as well. When the right wing does it is "controlling our sex lives" and when the left wing does it it is "exposing hypocrisy". You're only playing their game. Newt and the other republicans are all replaceble cogs in a machine and they are more than willing to sacrifice them to acheive their ends. The values you have given up by meeting them on their terms are not as replaceable. You're now deputized into the sex police.

I don't know that I fully agree with this. I mean, I believe that a lot of the value from thinking liberally about such things is that it fits with the world - people are fallible when it comes to sex matters, people are diverse in their sexuality and it doesn't always turn out that people follow the things that you're liable to read in the Bible.

I guess there's two ways to think of this - either you're a scold to point out the hypocrisy of the situation, or you're pointing out that everybody fucks up, and hoping that we can be more accepting and less judgmental.

I will say that I think that conservatives are as moral as liberals, and if there's any nastiness to the liberal reaction, it's a reaction, I feel, to the conservative assertion that they've got a lock on values issues. Though some conservatives are more frequent in their lauding of their own strong morals, they're no more moral than anybody else.