In an editorial the new House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in the Shreveport times in 2005, he concluded with this line: “We must always remember,” Johnson concluded, “that it is not bigotry to make moral distinctions.”

That is the line I would like to think about today. First, it is hard not to admire the rhetorical advantages of a line like that. “Bigotry” is bad and “moral distinctions” are good. And if they aren’t good, they are at least inevitable. Try to imagine objecting to “moral distinctions.” The set of examples you would get to test your objection would certainly include traitors, rapists, and murderers and you would be invited to “make no moral distinctions” about the people in those categories.

Johnson, having established that “making moral distinctions” is good is then free to make whatever distinctions seem good to him. There is no end to the cultural issues the Republican party is pursuing that can pass a “distinctions.” Anything on gender identity will work. A lot of things on race and ethnicity will work. The “right kind of family” will work. Abortion as murder, obviously.

All these pass as moral distinctions. But what Johnson really has his eye on is the charge by Democrats—and by majorities of Americans—that these positions are bigotry. The power of his distinction, then, is that it reassures Republicans that it is not bigotry. Notice that it doesn’t support any particular moral distinction. It doesn’t even say that making moral distinctions is a good idea. It only says that it isn’t bigotry.

It actually says so little, but I suspect we will be hearing it as a Republican shield for quite a while now. Provided that it works.

It is really no different than Barry Goldwater’s famous line: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Moderation in the protection of liberty is no virtue; extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice.”