Are you really surprised? If so, you might want to see a doctor about your amnesia, because my memory is pretty spotty and still I can recall Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker and Larry Craig and David Vitter, and with just a few minutes of Googling, I could fill the rest of this column with more names of more pastors and politicians who presented themselves as steadfast moral conservatives and were revealed to be agents of precisely the kind of behavior they so exuberantly condemned. These frauds and hypocrites are as legion now as lepers were in the days of Jesus.

If I sound bitter, I am, because they have long been among the principal purveyors of hatred for gay people like me. They’re a big reason that so many of us grew up terrified that we’d be ostracized, wondering if there was something twisted in us and confronted with laws that treated us as second-class citizens. We were supposedly in moral error, and thus deserved a lesser lot.

Second class is actually a much higher category than the one into which Moore would corral us. In 2002 he called sexual relations between people of the same gender “an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.” Trust me on this: It’s not so terribly difficult to describe. I’ll walk him through it over a chicken salad sandwich in the Times cafeteria. My treat.

In 2005 he said that having sex with somebody of the same gender was akin to having sex with a cow, a horse or a dog, and that not having sex with a cow, a horse, a dog or a person of the same gender was “a moral precept upon which this country was founded.” I do not recall the bestiality clause of the Constitution, but, as mentioned, my memory is spotty.

In 2016 Moore was expelled as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court because he instructed the state’s judges to defy the United States Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. This was the second time that Moore was yanked from that job; he’d previously ignored a federal court’s ruling that a Ten Commandments monument should be removed from the Alabama Judicial Building. Some patriot he is. His particular take on his chosen religion overrides the law of the land and permits him to act as he sees fit. Imagine if all Americans adopted that attitude.

And it is most decidedly a personal take, in which he picks and chooses what to be outraged by. Although Christianity as I understand it doesn’t smile on the florid lying, womanizing, hypersexual vocabulary and assorted cruelties that have been prominent threads in Donald Trump’s life, Moore and many other evangelical Christians spared Trump their censure. I understand their motivation to vote for him: abortion. But that didn’t compel them to remain so mum about his misdeeds or summon the adoration that some of them did. (I’m looking at you, Jerry Falwell Jr.)

On Thursday, Moore tweeted that “the forces of evil will lie, cheat, steal — even inflict physical harm — if they believe it will silence and shut up Christian conservatives like you and me.” So this is a war waged on him and his kind? What about the war that his breed of conservatives has been waging on the rest of us? It is arrogant and without empathy, and some of its generals use their cause as camouflage.

They also read the Bible selectively, as Zeigler demonstrated to the point of parody. Joseph and Mary as evangelists of transgenerational love? If you buy that, then allow me an invention of my own about the three wise men.