My brother-in-law posted an image to facebook. It's a poster, really, with this text (verbatim, all diction, grammar and punctuation errors being theirs, not mine):

The man who cheated on wife #1 with #2 (who got pregnant while he was still married to #1.) Cheated on #2 with #3; and, cheated on #3 with a porn star, enjoys the full support of the party of "Family Values" and "Conservative Evangelicals. It's not just you, We're confused too.

Well, I can understand the sentiment. I can explain it too. It's somewhat nuanced. Not very nuanced, mind you, but compared to "You-call-yourself-Christian-and-support-an-adulterer-so-you-are-a-flaming-hypocrite", it's nuanced.

I guess I have to start with what I view to be the position of "Family Values" and "Conservative Evangelical" types. It is NOT that adulterers are Bad People and we can only vote for Good People so this is Wrong. The fact is that there aren't any good people. There are people who are blind to themselves and therefore think themselves good, and there are people who are partially blind to themselves and therefore realize, to varying extents, that we are not good. But on our side of the spectrum, it's not possible to vote for a good person. There aren't any. There's no hard and fast divide between Good People you can vote for and Bad People you can't.

Now, misdeeds come in varying levels of severity. I'd rather you robbed me than murdered me, and I'd rather you hated me than robbed me. Adultery is a really bad one (as are most kinds of sexual immorality, but let's focus in for simplicity). The Biblical position is that adulterers are not qualified for church leadership for two reasons:

1. Even if it is repented of, moved on from, and firmly in the past, the person has a bad reputation now and it casts a bad light on the church. You can see this, of course, in spades with Mr. Trump and the presidency. Just the kind of thing the poster says, is what I'm talking about. It doesn't make any difference whether it is in his past or not, does it? (Nor do I know if it is in his past. I'm just saying.)

2. This reason is more interesting. The thinking is that if a person will not honor sacred wedding vows, he's unlikely to honor anything. Just what are you willing to entrust to someone who violates such sacred, weighty vows? What rules won't they break? What won't they fail to respect? You want someone like that in charge of you or your welfare or your stuff? Not hardly.

So yeah, you can see the fairness of the question: if this guy isn't qualified to lead in the church, how can Christians support him to lead the government?

Of course, the first thing to acknowledge is that this did not happen in a vacuum. The choice was not between Donald Trump and Harry Truman. It was between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So let's dig into that a little by considering my two points with these specific people.

Donald Trump, by any reasonable estimation, is guilty of adultery. This casts the office of President in a bad light. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a person who put the USA up for sale as Secretary of State, laundering payments into the Clinton Foundation. She used a private server for government business, which is illegal. This is beyond dispute. The likelihood is that she did this to conceal her influence peddling business. She most certainly had classified information on that server, which is a serious crime. She weaponized the Democratic National Committee to deny the nomination to Bernie Sanders. And you know I'm only scratching the surface. Even if the Clinton's decades-long trail of slime is somehow, incredibly, all false, it still would have cast the office of President in a bad light. And how, in a president, can a reputation of adultery be worse than a reputation of corruption? So my question for her supporters is this: if people should not have supported Trump because of his reputation, isn't it even truer that people should not have supported Clinton for the same reason?

Turning to the second point, Donald Trump's adultery calls into question whether he would faithfully and honorably execute the office of President. But there is no such question with Mrs. Clinton. The progress of her career makes it crystal clear that corruption was a positive certainty. Adultery is bad because it implies a person might do what Hillary actually does. So my question for her supporters is this: if people should not have supported Trump because of the chance that he would be corrupt, isn't it even truer that people should not have supported Clinton because of the certainty?

Let's face it. Many Republicans supported him just because of the party. And many Democrats supported Clinton for the same reason. But I find the objections raised by the poster to be much more applicable to Clinton and her supporters, than to Trump and his. Unless the point is that Democrats care nothing about honor, rectitude, honesty, or responsible government and so the standard doesn't apply over there. But I didn't say that. We're all on the hook, here.

If Donald Trump had been running against an honorable, principled Democrat, I think he would have been wiped out. I think everyone on every side was holding their noses. And I find it disingenuous to pretend that this only applies to Trump supporters. I will confess here that I did not vote for Trump. Of course, my state was lost to Clinton anyway and my vote didn't matter, so it was a cheap decision. If the state had been in play, I still don't know what I would have done. But let's face it: if the poster's accusation is basically that people violated their own standards to vote for somebody, well, there are more guilty Clinton voters than guilty Trump voters.

Let me be fair: the poster is in present tense, talking about now, and not the election. I will submit to you that Trump has succeeded on point #2 despite the reservations. He has not ruled by executive order. He has abided by court decisions, some of which were perfectly ludicrous (not to go down a rabbit hole, but how can a court say it's unconstitutional to rescind an executive order? That could only mean his prececessor was Constitutionally obligated to issue said order. Anyway...) He has not had the Executive branch refuse to enforce laws it does not like. There is no indication that he has weaponized any departments of the government against his enemies. He has been returning power to the legislature via repeal of regulations that did not originate from legislation. He has wildly exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations, and he has also measurably, objectively, surprisingly exceeded his predecessor in terms of declining to misuse his delegated powers.

Here is the problem, which we all concur on: style. He's crude and rude and brash and mean. It's hard to watch, and even when it works, you just wish he'd do it another way. But I'm reminded of Lincoln's response when he was urged to remove General Grant, who apparently had his own serious style problems: "I cannot spare this man. He fights."

If you don't like what he's accomplishing, say so. But spare me the sermonizing. It rings pretty hollow.