... if one can boycott Hobby Lobby, boycotting Woody Allen follows. Once he's dead, it may be easier to judge his works without mixing in one's judgement of the creator.
But in the case of saluting uniforms, or priests in a state of sin administering the sacraments, the issue is not one of appraising the individual's work, but of due submission to authority. The priest is not judged on how well he administers mass, but whether or not he has the standing to administer mass at all. In a hierarchical organization, such challenges to authority are not usually permitted gracefully.
Aesthetic judgement, however, is judgement; the artist is evaluated on the basis of how good we think his work is. So, while we do have a similarity in separating the rank from the man, and the artist from the work, in the former case, we are discussing whether the man is fit to hold the rank. In art, we are not discussing the fitness of the artist to be an artist (the question does not arise at all), but the value of his work.
There is some crossover, of course: one can evaluate a priest in the exercise of his office, or an officer in terms of how well he does his work. A good captain could also be a rotten man. But in judging fitness, we do not evaluate proficiency: a priest could be poor at administering mass, yet a very good man, and good at the other offices of priesthood. His proficiency at administering mass would not enter into the question of whether or not he is a good priest, or fit to hold the office of priest. (Provided we were permitted to ask the question in the first place)
I would note, parenthetically, that the question of the character of the artist entering into the judgement of the art is not dissimilar to the question of judging art by whether or not it serves the State, or some other institution. In both cases, the work itself is not judged by itself, but in relation to some matter extraneous to the work. It is more a question of morality (however conceived) than of aesthetics. It's also, sometimes, a question of utility: the value of the art is how well it serves some purpose, not as a work of itself.
An ideologue would probably maintain that "good" art cannot be created by anyone who is not an adherent of the ideology; a Platonist would likely argue that Evil cannot create Good. Of course, no one is purely Evil (except, perhaps, Mitch McConnell), so in art we are left with the conundrum once suggested by Jimmy Buffett: "How can you write that sensitive stuff, and then write that trash?" Well, Jimmy tells us, "I can be sensitive on some occasions, and trashy on others." The fact that artists are human, and thus come from different places at different times, should be all that is necessary to answer the OP's question, although further, one might consider that an artist's despicable aspects might not be informing any specific piece of art.
-- Mal
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