In the fall of 1996, while the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was being debated, four politicians who were key to its becoming law were adulterers, including two who were involved in adulteries while the bill was being debated.
The world has long known that Pres. Clinton, who signed the bill in September 1996, was having an affair at the time with Monica Lewinsky. But now, for the first time, then-House Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich has acknowledged that he was having an affair with his current wife, Calista Biseck, while he was married to his second wife, Marianne.
Gingrich confessed his adultery in an interview this week with James Dobson, a professional homophobe who heads Focus on the Family, one of the nation’s most virulent anti-gay organizatons.
Sources say the affair had been ongoing at least three years (and possibly for five years) prior to his divorce in 1999. In any case, it is clear that while Gingrich was cheating on his wife, in his role as Speaker he put the passage of DOMA at the top of the agenda for the House six weeks before the 1996 presidential elections.
And that was the real point. DOMA was a cynical election-year ploy devised by Republicans to drive a wedge between Pres. Clinton and his supporters in the gay community. DOMA presented Clinton with two bad options. If he vetoed it, Republicans would use it to enflame their homophobic base. If he signed it, he would risk dampening support from gays on election day. In the raw calculus of politics, Clinton chose the least risky option and signed it.
The other two adulterous politicians were recently retired Sen. Bob Dole, who was the GOP presidential nominee that year, and who had admitted to having an affair while married to his first wife — and then-Rep. Bob Barr, who first proposed DOMA, and who reportedly was unfaithful during at least one of his three marriages.
Gingrich apparently dumped second wife Marianne after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis in 1999. In true Newt fashion, the Speaker notified his wife that he was ending the marriage during a phone call while Marianne was with her family celebrating her mother’s 84th birthday. Marianne Gingrich should have seen it coming. Gingrich famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.
Gingrich is considering running for president in 2008.
Harken My Words, Neglect My Deeds – wouldn’t it be high time to dump all politicians who still stick to such dysfunctional and poisonous tenets?
Every partent does know that this does not work when you want to raise a healthy and honest child.
Politicians should be concerned with taking care of society – with all its members, and to pave the way for justice and reason. That is, they should protect the civil rights, and thus preserve the Constitution of the USA.
They should not waste the voters’s time with their opinions on their petty personal opinions on this and that.
Get real, dinosaurs on the Hill! Your expiration date is long overdue. Start doing politics, or get out of our way!
Unfortunately, too many of these old goats – Newt too – seem to always ‘cleanse’ themselves in the eyes of the public, yet their private family life is basically destroyed. As far as I am concerned they all need a trip to Hell and back…maybe just a one way ticket on second thought.