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It's not a particularly isolated demand for rigor in the context of Republicans' reaction to Clinton's affairs or the extent to which Republicans have courted the religious right via abortion (arguments about this being more consequential than polygamy are well taken) or gay marriage (not well taken here).
Just to add perspective since I was alive and watching the news during the Clinton drama, there were a variety of objections in increasing importance:
Characterizing the reaction to Clinton as being primarily about the sanctity of marriage is, I think, not remotely reasonable.
Ken Starr was investigating the Lewinsky matter, to establish a pattern of behavior showing that Bill Clinton routinely treated his female staff as a stable of potential sexual conquests.
The fact that most people's impression of the Lewinsky scandal was 'bfd, he cheated on his wife' is a genuinely impressive feat of PR from the Clinton Machine.
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I'm not clear what context you're thinking of. For example, my perspective on the context of the Republican's reaction to the Clinton affairs is that the Democrats largely won the social argument on sexual impropriety even before Trump showed up. Marriage was not that important as a special/sacred thing, and it was so not-important that it was subject to redefinition a decade and so later. The Republicans lost that, and so 20, let alone 30, years after Clinton, the Republican party is not exactly campaigning on marriage issues.
Obergefell was in 2015 and occurred, in my estimation, probably five or so years before the median Republican primary voter had naturally shifted to favoring gay marriage. Resentment against Obergefell being legislation from the bench very much figured into Trump's 2016 win.
I don't think that the argument that Republicans who have previously campaigned or voted based on purported religious principles can now shift to not caring about marriage without abdicating their moral authority, including retroactively, holds water. These principles should be firm. There are probably many more Republican atheists today and the Pence wing of the Republican party is now some combination of homeless and rubes (a lot like the libertarian wing!), so the Republican party abandoning morality in its current campaigning is very logical - but that they have done so is precisely the point of the OP.
There used to be a very understandable alliance between the religious conservatives and Republicans/Trump on abortion, but that battle has now been won at a national level (and abortion is proving a losing issue for Republicans at a state level, so they are dmeemphasizing that outside of appeals to the base). The alliance between religious conservatives and Republicans is now regarding... trans kids playing in high school sports? This is incredibly weak tea to overlook the other implications of a staunchly religious position.
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Why?
This presumes the religious beliefs are the principles that govern political, as opposed to principles of co-existence that allow certain stridency in some topics that have a consensus, and more restrained actions in more controversial issues. Or that actions were properly executing principles in the first place, when additional information- such as increased visibility/exposure/familiarity- would dispel misconceptions and allow principles to be expressed differently. Or that these principles expressed in the past were the primary principles in all contexts, as opposed to always having higher principles but with conditionalities that were not present in the past but are present now. Or that the principles expressed were actual principles as opposed to preferences- the whole principles according to who is in power dynamic, but reversed.
It even presumes that individually-held principles should hold across generations, regardless of time and turnover. Many of the Republicans who made up the religious right as leaders or influencers are no longer Republicans. Some died. Some defected with the ongoing political realignment. Some have disengaged from politics entirely. People voting Republican today are often quite literally not the same people voting Republican a generation ago during the Clinton years and then into the Bush years. The majority of the war fighters in the US, literal and cultural, were born after 9-11.
Why should they hold firm to the principles that different people held in different decades?
'Republicans' and even 'the Republican party' are not some singular collective hive mind, anymore than anyone else. They certainly aren't trans-temporal.
In my view, my reference to "Republicans who have campaigned or previously voted" was indeed me individualizing the standard.
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