Adultery Is the Real Threat to Marriage, So Where Is the Clamor to Deny Civil Rights to Philanderers?

Reacting to the overturning of Proposition 8 by a federal judge in California yesterday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — a serial adulterer who led the impeachment of Pres. Clinton over a sex lie about an extramarital affair with a staffer while he himself was engaged in an affair with a staffer — said this:

Judge Walker’s ruling overturning Prop 8 is an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution and for the majority of people of the United States who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife. In every state of the union from California to Maine to Georgia, where the people have had a chance to vote they’ve affirmed that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Congress now has the responsibility to act immediately to reaffirm marriage as a union of one man and one woman as our national policy. Today’s notorious decision also underscores the importance of the Senate vote tomorrow on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court because judges who oppose the American people are a growing threat to our society.

They won’t admit it outright, but what Republican politicians like Gingrich and anti-gay activist groups like the National Organization for Marriage, Family Research Council, American Family Association and the rest are really advocating is restricting the right of gays to marry based solely on their status as sinners.

But no matter how you slice it — whether from a societal, moral, or religious point of view — it is adultery, not gay marriage, that is real threat to marriage and society.

Societal: Adultery is a prime cause of divorce, which leads to single-parent homes, which in turn contributes to poverty, poor health care for children, juvenile crime and a host of other social ills.

Moral: Cheating on one’s spouse is implicitly lying. The cheating partner is also breaking his or her marriage vow, which is a solemn social contract.

Religious: Adultery is addressed in not one but two of the Ten Commandments. Number 7 is unambiguous, “You shall not commit adultery.” Number 10 forbids even a roving eye: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Compared with the double whammy against adultery in the Decalogue, the Bible’s prohibitions against gay sex are meager. In the Old Testament, gay sex is included in a long list of abominations that includes eating ham, shellfish like shrimp and lobster and leftovers that are three days old; reading a horoscope or visiting a psychic; burning incense; cheating at business; women wearing slacks and men wearing kilts; wicked scheming; troublemaking; and arrogance, just to name a few. Gay sex is also mentioned a couple of times in the New Testament, though never by Jesus himself — only by Paul who clearly had issues with human sexuality in general.

Finally, whether it is undertaken in the heat of the moment or as a result of planning and “wicked scheming,” adultery is a choice, no different from choosing to lie, cheat or steal. While anti-gay activists like to say people choose to be gay, they always deny that they themselves chose to be straight — failing to see the disconnect: If they did not, could not, choose to be anything but straight, why on earth would they believe gay people could make the same choice in reverse? In reality, you have to be innately bisexual — a Kinsey 1 or 2, at least — to believe that people can choose which gender they are attract to.

If anti-gay activists are determined to codify their religious views on homosexuality into law, they ought to be forced to explain why the much greater sin of adultery — an act that is also wrong in the secular sphere — is not outlawed as well.

They wouldn’t get far politically trying to criminalize adultery, of course. The Republican Party leadership is riddled with notorious adulterers, including two sitting senators, John Ensign of Nevada and David Vitter of Louisiana, and a whole host of luminaries ranging from Gingrich, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fox News mainstays Dick Morris and Bill O’Reilly, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain to the party’s sainted Ronald Reagan, whose first wife Jane Wyman was married to someone else when they first started dating.

Still, until the religious right and the Republican politicians who use their bigotry to win votes start demanding laws restricting the rights of adulterers, no one should take their opposition to gay marriage as anything other than what it is: hypocrisy.