On last week’s installment of Bill Maher’s HBO show “Real Time,” the host did a highly amusing post-mortem on the Republican presidential debate.

Maher particularly worked himself into (highly justified) high dudgeon over a section of the debate in which the candidates vied with each other to see who had parented the most children. That has, of course, been a big part of Michele Bachmann’s campaign so far; she often finds a reason to mention the 20-plus foster children she’s taken in over the years.

Maher raised an interesting point: What does the number of kids you’ve lived with have to do with your qualifications to be president? It has to do with the way “values voters” make decisions; the more kids a person has, the better a person they are, some apparently feel. Rolling with that, Maher mentioned that such thinking leads to the exaltation of people like the Duggar family, the reality-show stars who have 19 kids. Maher bluntly called the Duggars “freaks.”

I don’t spend a lot of time on right-wing religious blogs, but I imagine Maher’s bare-knuckled assessment of the Duggars probably riled some of those folks. Maher’s viewership probably is light on Christian fundamentalists, but somebody likely saw it and raised the alarm.

Not only was Maher right about the presidential debate, but he was right about the Duggars as well. The comedian is something of an environmentalist and the subtext was that in a world where many people don’t have enough resources to live, it’s the height of selfishness for a family to have 19 children – and use the resources a family that size consumes. Even if the Duggars can care financially for 19 children, which they probably couldn’t without the money they make from pimping their “lifestyle” out to the media, it’s not a question of money. It’s a question of using more of the earth’s shrinking bounty than you’re entitled to.

But no matter how you might feel about the Duggars, it raises another interesting question. For more than three decades, a candidate’s moral character has been a big part of the political debate in this country. That’s a consequence of allowing the religious right to set the terms of political debate. But what’s so irritating about that debate is the limited and frankly vacuous view of morality on which it focuses. In other words, people make moral judgments on a few insignificant things that don’t really affect them personally, but don’t make moral judgments on things that do.

I would defy you to find me an argument against gay marriage that is not based on a narrow, minority view of morality. For all the bloviating you hear about how gay marriage harms the institution of marriage itself, I’ve never heard a good explanation of how that is and why it’s true. People who oppose gay marriage never present any real evidence that it affects anyone other than the two people involved. At best, they trot out the same arguments that were once used against racially mixed marriages. The effectiveness of those arguments is pretty obvious; no state has miscegenation laws anymore and anybody who proposed one would be seen as a particularly rank variety of Neanderthal.

But while things like gay marriage are seriously debated in this country, nobody ever talks about the hogging of scarce resources by people like the Duggars, or the hogging of limited economic resources by corporate CEOs who make more in an hour than any of their underlings do in a month. If you talk about attempts to level the playing field, the tin-hat crowd starts screaming about socialism and that talk filters down to previously reasonable segments of the public.

There are philosophers who spent whole lifetimes debating the morality of various practices and those discussions can get pretty arcane. Ultimately, a person’s moral views are based on some very basic conceptions of what reality is and how it works and reasonable people can differ on those basic ideas. In the end, while right-wing fundamentalists are more than a bit creepy, what really separates us is questions about things that are basic to human existence – questions as basic as what you can really know and how you can know it. And on that score, they could be wrong, I could be wrong; hell, we could both be wrong.

But when we as a society debate things like gay marriage, just to cite one example, we never question whether we should even be making a moral judgment on something that really has no effect. On the other hand, we don’t even try to discuss the morality of things like income inequality. To put it another way: Maybe the problem with the economic disparity in this country is that it just isn’t right. People should be deeply offended that it’s possible for anybody in this, the greatest nation in the history of the world, to suffer and even die because they cannot afford medical care.

What’s really scary is there’s a real strain of thought in this country that if you even ask questions like that, you’re a socialist or a communist or some other kind of black hat. It shuts down the discussion, as absolute moral judgments without debate are wont to do.

That has been yet another failure of progressives in this country. We haven’t tried to promote our arguments on moral grounds. We’ve tried to appeal to voters’ intellects and have basically ignored their sense of right and wrong.

This is not some clarion call for socialism or communism or, for that matter, any –ism. It is, however, a call to talk about it. People on the right often paint people on the left as evil, and perhaps the time has come to fight back. Right-wing, fundamentalist Christianity is not the only deeply felt moral stance people have. What’s needed is less the courage of our convictions than the willingness to explain them. Maybe, once we start doing that, this country can move away from the selfishness, stupidity and short-sightedness that threatens to overwhelm us.