I am not a "moral floor"

John Emerson has a post over at Seeing the Forest (it's short so I'm just going to steal the whole thing:

The big reason for the anti-gay fervor within the hard right is that it puts down a moral floor. Normal sleazy backsliding Christians can always say "I'm a sinner, I've succumbed to temptation many times and I probably will do so again -- but I've never done anything as disgusting as that. And I never will."

Sleazy Christians think of Jesus the way they think of their connection at the county courthouse -- a get-out-of-hell-free card. "I may not seem like a believer, but Jesus is there when I need him", one scuzzbag told me.

One day the real Christians (wrong-headed as they are in some respects) are going to understand how badly they've been used, and how their combination of self-righteousness, ignorance, and political cynicism (politics is the fallen world, so anything goes there) has caused them to become evil.

Christians will be judged too.

I think he's got a good point, and I'd never thought of the anti-gay platform that way before. It has occurred to me that the lifelong celibacy they're always trying to push on anyone not like them must always sound so easy when it's someone else that has to do it.

My worry is that this day of reckoning, when Christians discover what patsies they have been, and how they have been used by the Republicans to gain power will only push them to become more extreme, to become more doctrinaire, and things will just get worse.