You’d have to go back to the Jim Crow era to find a law as imbued with bigotry and hatred as DOMA, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which Pres. Clinton signed into law in 1996. It’s back in the news now because Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the administration would no longer defend it in court.

DOJ has made it clear, however, that the Legislative Branch is free to defend DOMA in upcoming hearings, which would put Speaker Boehner and his tea party bosses in the same position as the defenders of Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay constitutional amendment. The Prop 8 defenders lost in federal court last year because their “expert” witnesses’ biblical-based testimony that gay marriage should be illegal because homosexuality is a sin was deemed inadmissible in court and because they were unable to provide any evidence that same-sex marriage harms society.

Newt Gingrich, who, as speaker of the House, was instrumental in pushing the law through in 1996, has criticized the president for abandoning the defense of DOMA, and has even suggested that the president could be impeached because he “swore an oath on the Bible to ensure that laws be faithfully executed, not to decide which laws are and which are not constitutional” — a typical falsehood-within-a-falsehood that only liars as practiced as Gingrich can get away with. In reality, the administration said it will continue to enforce the law, and the courts will ultimately decide whether DOMA is constitutional, with or without a defense by the Executive or, for that matter, the Legislative branch.

Gingrich feels free to weigh in on DOMA because he’s never had to address the fact that while DOMA was sailing through the House under his direction, he was quite openly engaged in an extramarital affair with a congressional staffer. His affair with Callista Bisek, which apparently started in 1995, had been reported in British newspapers, Time magazine and Salon.com well before DOMA was debated in the House. The affair continued for years, and was still going on while Speaker Gingrich led the impeachment of Pres. Clinton over the president’s own affair with a staffer. In fact, Republicans in Congress became so unnerved by the prospect of the speaker’s affair coming to light while they drummed up outrage over Clinton’s dalliances that, in 1998, a group of GOP House members — including at least briefly current Speaker John Boehner — demanded that Gingrich resign. Gingrich was finally forced to acknowledge the affair the following year when it became public record during his second divorce.

A serial adulterer, Gingrich had multiple extramarital affairs when he was a college teacher. He is also infamous for an incident during his first divorce — he left wife number one after a lengthy affair with soon-to-be wife number two — when he forced his first wife to discuss details of their separation while she was in a hospital bed recuperating from cancer surgery.

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