You might have seen that the wingers are baying for Larry Craig’s blood - or at least his Senate seat - while remaining curiously quiet about Sen. David Vitter’s little indiscretions. Aside from the fact that if Vitter resigned a Democratic governor would get to appoint his replacement - and Craig can safely be thrown to the wolves because Idaho has a Republican governor - Ross Douthat explains another aspect of the dynamic in play:

The reason that gay rights became a political issue in a way that various other frankly more important issues having to do with marriage and family life did not — particularly issues about divorce and heterosexual divorce rates and single parenthood — is that, clearly, it is easier to demonize gay people. And it is much more of an electoral winner.

So Craig can be tossed under the bus because he’s maybe a queer. Vitter too may be sticking it where it doesn’t belong. But at least he’s doing it in a nice, hetero way.

Update: Greenwald nails it:

The only kind of “morality” that this 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.