Remember Larry Craig? He was the Republican Senator from Idaho who was arrested for “lewd conduct” in a Minneapolis airport restroom in 2007 after allegedly attempting to induce an undercover police officer in the stall beside him to engage in sexual activities. After a voting record with highlights that included strong support for “don’t ask, don’t tell” and vehement opposition to gay marriage, Craig then had to deal with the eight gay men who came forward to the Idaho Statesman newspaper claiming they had each had some sort of sexual encounter with the Senator. With his reputation in ruins, Craig’s position became untenable and he never ran for office again, the gulf between his public pronouncements and private fixations having revealed a Grade-A hypocrite.

There is something deliciously dramatic and inevitable, almost oedipan, about those who arm themselves with the breastplate of righteousness in their public lives and claim divine inspiration for their work. Next time you hear some distinctly pontificating speech, complete with all the moralising bells and whistles, set your watch and wait. It is likely that in no time at all, he or she who uttered the words will be found squalid and exposed, tied up as they surely will be in a heap of threatening text messages, crusty toilet paper and a defence that becomes thinner and more ludicrous by the minute.

And so the baton has now been handed to a certain Lisa Biron, a New Hampshire-based lawyer who worked for the euphemistically-named Alliance Defending Freedom (this firm has the distinction of containing three of the most favoured buzz words used by bigoted anti-gay groups; a token ‘Family’ would turn this ménage à trois into a full-blown foursome), a group that aims to “keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system and advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family.” Alas, federal prosecutors have said that Biron transported a teen girl from Manchester, NH to somewhere in Ontario, Canada, where she forced her young and presumably highly distressed kidnappee to engage in sexual acts with another, as yet undisclosed, person while being filmed by Biron. Biron has also been arrested for owning a computer stuffed with child pornography and, to top it all off, witnesses have testified that this defender of Christian values (another popular word among the dogmatic) has been found in possession of various illegal drugs.

So next time you hear those speeches, just sit and wait. The internal paranoia swimming around the minds and bodies of those purporting to do God’s work on Earth will eventually burst forth.