I can't get too worked up over the Roy Moore situation, but it's important to say why

The Alabama Senate seat just isn't my hill to die on.

So many levels to this: let's start with Moore himself. It's a major stretch to say he embodies the central tenets of conservatism. His ham-handed gestures and utterances over the years might indicate that those tenets constitute the core of who he is, but they seem more likely to be a crude kind of marketing tool, a currying of favor with the yee-haw wing of the right-of-center voting populace. It is one thing to forthrightly proclaim the Ten Commandments as central to one's values and policy orientation, even to press for their status as the wellspring of Western legal thought; it is quite another to plunk a granite monument inscribed with them on the courthouse lawn. It is one thing to fully understand the magnitude of the jihadist threat against the West and amass all available resources to act on that understanding; it is quite another to declare that certain Illinois and Indiana municipalities are subject to sharia. It is one thing to state unflinchingly that homosexuality is statistically abnormal, runs counter to nature's design for sex as a species-propagating drive, and is, per Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6 and Leviticus 18, a violation of God's law. It is quite another to assert that it ought to be illegal.

Then there is the question of whether he's guilty or innocent of all or any of the sexual-impropriety accusations against him. He claims that the former waitress's yearbook is fake and wants to see Gloria Allred turn it over to a third party. He seems to have been a faithful husband and dutiful father since getting married. Still, there are so many stories now, each told in such detail, and bolstered by the recollections of townsfolk who recall his "weird" dating proclivities during the late 1970s that it seems unlikely that all of them have been concocted out of whole cloth. I still maintain that anybody who says that he can be presumed either completely innocent or completely guilty is jumping the gun.

Then there is there very real undesirability of Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate. He is fine with late-term abortions. He may qualify his statements about gun control by claiming to be a big Second Amendment proponent, but he goes in for that "common-sense measures" talk that is the stuff of slippery slopes.

Still, it comes down to Ben Shapiro's point: "If we’re really at the point in American politics where political opposition requires electing credibly accused child molesters, then we ought to put down ballots and pick up guns.

Then, of course, there is Donald Trump, who can be counted on to weigh in with something ridiculous, something incoherent and devoid of substance. "He says it didn't happen" is about as vacuous as it comes.

Are Moore's enthusiasts giving any thought to the bad blood that is going to be implicit in his relations with fellow Republican Senators from the get-go? Have they considered this from a branding standpoint? What if an issue comes before that chamber and its true good guys - say, Ben Sasse, Ted Cruz or Mike Lee - are passionate about a particular legislative approach to dealing with it, and Moore also vocally supports such an approach? How many microseconds do Moore fans think it will take for leftist Senators, leftist pundits and the frenzied social-media warriors to lump all these figures together and tarnish the effort?

It gets harder by the day to resist tribalist gotcha, to set as a goal the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of progressives. Still, resist we must. Any such wailing is merely the byproduct of what we ought to be after: the furtherance of our principles in the realms of public policy and far more importantly the culture.

I actually make this argument on the basis of absolutism. The moral relativity which we rightly ascribe to the Left will have infected us deeply, maybe fatally, if we work to send someone to Capitol Hill who plausibly acted in utter violation of what we know to be right and true.

I'll be blunt: I am wary in the extreme of anyone who is going out of his or her way to persuade us that Moore is most likely innocent when we know no such thing.

I think he should go just because it's too late to repair whatever stature he once had.