I’m stunned by what Senator Jim DeMint says about moral requirements for teachers. Not only is he against gay teachers, but also against single women who sleep with their boyfriends. Not clear what he thinks of those boyfriends having sex before marriage, but they don’t seem to alarm him so much. Here’s how he was quoted in the Spartanburg, S.C., newspaper:

DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom. “(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense,” he said. “But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn’t back down. They don’t want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.”

To me, job discrimination against people on the basis of private sexual practices, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is what is truly immoral. Senator DeMint’s first comment plays into larger anti-gay bigotry and the second into anti-women narratives.

But there’s a larger point here. So many conservatives focus on morality as a function of personal, private behavior, such as sexual orientation, while ignoring more basic issues of poverty and social justice. And it astonishes me that they seem driven by the Bible, when Jesus was profoundly concerned with social justice and was hostile to nit-picking judgmental codes.

There certainly are immense moral challenges in this country, but aren’t they more along the lines of children who don’t get health care? Or school kids who don’t get the same opportunity in life because they go to third-rate inner-city schools? Or kids who are trafficked into a modern version of slavery? Or the need to raise the U.S. contribution to the Global Fund so that fewer people die around the world of AIDS, malaria and TB? Or working more energetically to end the brutal war in Congo and forestall the war that may be coming in South Sudan? It seems to me that there are plenty of genuine opportunities for Senator DeMint to get on his high horse, and I’d love to see him show some moral leadership. But discriminating against teachers on the basis of their private sexual conduct is pathetic and ludicrous — and, in my eyes, immoral to boot.