Politics & Power Quote by Will Durst

A one-liner like this works because it swings a sledgehammer with a feather: it pretends to ask an innocent question about sexual shame, then yanks the rug out with a partisan punchline. Durst’s intent isn’t theological; it’s diagnostic. He’s pointing at the cultural machinery that brands sex as “dirty” and suggesting that the stigma isn’t natural law, it’s politics wearing a halo.

The subtext is a critique of American moral regulation, especially the brand that treats sex as a public threat while quietly relying on it as a private obsession. By invoking “God,” Durst satirizes the way religious language gets conscripted into policy arguments, as if discomfort could be upgraded into divine instruction. The joke lands because it treats “dirty” as a manufactured category and then names a familiar manufacturer: the conservative coalition that has historically pushed abstinence rhetoric, censored bodies, and framed sexuality as a battlefield for “family values.” Calling God “a Republican” is deliberately unfair in the way satire needs to be: it exaggerates to expose how often moral certainty is just party branding.

Context matters. Durst comes out of political comedy, where the job is less to arbitrate truth than to puncture self-seriousness. The line plays on a long American contradiction: a culture saturated with sex sells and scandal, yet governed by recurring panics about purity. The sting isn’t anti-faith so much as anti-pretense: if sex is “dirty,” someone made it so, and they likely mailed out fundraising letters about it.