I can certainly agree with you up to the middle of your comments.  Then, there is a departure.  "Priests and religious should be held to higher standards...."  Yes, the official church HOLDS them to higher standards.  1) Priests are not only trained to serve at the altar, but to have a deeper spiritual life.  Unlike Protestant ministers [and I know a number of excellent Protestant ministers], their whole formation is different.  Protestant seminarians go to school and then go home each day.  Catholic seminarians live at the seminary and gather to pray the Divine Office, pray the rosary and other devotions, engage in spiritual reading, and have conferences in spiritual life directed to them.  Do you do that when you were in your late teens and early twenties?  

AND the official CHURCH ordains priests----with a special sacrament of service called Holy Orders.  Religious also are laity, but in a special category called "Consecrated Life" and they have the same routines as seminarians.