Immoral Values Republican

There’s hope yet for Larry Flynt. If a total sleazebag like Newt Gingrich can be embraced by the so-called Christian Right the way he has been in the Republican primaries, then a mere pornographer like Flynt should easily attain salvation or at least have a credible run for the Presidency. Even in his heyday, Larry may have been truly decadent, but he wasn’t ever the outrageous hypocrite that Newt—the darling of the “family values” Republicans—represents.

Can you imagine the gall of a politician, who claims to fear the judgment of the Almighty, going to the hospital to tell his cancer-stricken wife Jackie that he’s leaving her for another woman? Then, after 19 years of marriage to that other woman, demanding—as second jilted wife Marianne Ginther told ABC News in that famous January 2012 interview—that she consent to an open marriage so he could go on fornicating with one of the young Congressional staffers who was working for him during his reign as Speaker of the House? And then having sex with that much younger aide, Callista Bisek, in the very bed he had shared with wife Marianne, at the very time he was condemning the President of the United States (Bill Clinton) for merely getting a blowjob in the White House?

Gingrich has the arrogance to blame his infidelities, as he did in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, on his love not of women but of country: “There is no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard, and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.” That’s one Clinton should have used to explain away his more muted dalliance with an intern.

At least Clinton stuck by his wife, as scripture dictates, but not so for Gingrich, who looked to marry arm-candy as a way of distracting from his own terminally frumpy appearance. Then he sought to shroud that sordid affair with the sanctity of the Roman Catholic Church by seeking an annulment of his marriage to Marianne to wed the never-married Callista in a Catholic house of worship.