In a Huffington Post interview published on December 20, Newt Gingrich attempts to chart a course for Republican competitiveness (or relevance) in national elections. As usual with the former Speaker, there is a sleight of hand that avoids personal responsibility and reworks the facts.
Consider his exposition on same-sex marriage:
On gay marriage, meanwhile, Gingrich argued that Republicans could no longer close their eyes to the course of public opinion. While he continued to profess a belief that marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, he suggested that the party (and he himself) could accept a distinction between a “marriage in a church from a legal document issued by the state” — the latter being acceptable.
No proposed, or enacted, legislation regarding marriage equality has required churches to perform the ceremony. The stance has always been: Civil marriage is a civil right. One of the right’s longstanding fear tactics is that ministers and priests will lose their free speech rights and be “forced to preach the homosexual lifestyle.” I am not fooled by Gingrich’s slipperiness on the slippery slope that never was.
Stepping back from the political, Gingrich noted that he has a personal stake in the gay marriage debate. His half-sister works at the Human Rights Campaign. He has gay friends who’ve gotten married in Iowa. The man who once compared same-sex marriage to paganism is now worried that the Republican Party could find itself trapped in a bygone era on the matter.
Before Gingrich compared same-sex marriage to paganism, he regularly compared homosexuality to alcoholism. The “big thinker” of Republican Party first made the alcoholic comparison in 1994, 22 years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a mental disorder.
And if Gingrich does have a personal stake in the debate, why wasn’t it on display before now? Seems he had little use for his sister, Candace, when he was pontificating on Fox or pandering to the far right during his 2011-12 presidential run.
“I didn’t think that [the party’s predicament] was inevitable 10 or 15 years ago, when we passed the Defense of Marriage Act,” he said. “It didn’t seem at the time to be anything like as big a wave of change as we are now seeing.”
More Gingrich B.S. The wave of change was nearing full crest in September 2011, when Gingrich called gay marriage, “a temporary aberration that will dissipate.” He even called for President Obama to be impeached over the administration’s refusal to defend DOMA in court.
To his list of post mortems on the 2012 campaign, Gingrich should add this. While President Obama embraced marriage equality and defended his historic expansion of access to healthcare, Mitt Romney and most Republicans played shamelessly to the old bromides of the right.
In the Huff Post piece, Gingrich refuses the self-examination that goes to the heart of this matter: leaders lead.
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I don’t know if Newt really has Presidential abmtiions, or if he’s just being Newt spouting wild and crazy sh$te that excites his followers. I suppose he’s crazy enough to think he could make it to the Oval Office. I am glad that Queen Sarah apparently has a useful purpose, drawing away into his demographic.For years, righties have been getting the Muslim threat drummed into their heads, beginning with Saddam = Hitler, during GWB’s run-up into Iraq. Someday try and bring one of them down from the ceiling who’s shouting into your face they want to establish a caliphate across the globe!!! and you’ll get where Newt and his frightened followers are coming from.Somebody has to take the position that GWB didn’t go far enough and clearly, given the neocons’ goals: eradicating evil by planting American flags everywhere to grateful multitudes GWB failed. It may as well be Newt, given his flair for extreme, but intellectually sounding rhetoric.More seriously the moment is coming when we Americans are going to have to attempt an adult conversation with these rabid warmongers who want to exercise their fears with Muslim boogeymen using real troops, drones, etc against real people in real countries across the planet all of which is causing a serious strain on the country’s finances, to say nothing of its once proud but now severely compromised democratic institutions. Someone has to come forward and tell these frightened little children that we cannot afford their fantasies any more.The whole idea of eradicating evil which was for me, the first, screaming in-your-face, clear-as-day sign that GWB was patently nuts, or an incredible liar, or both is a task best left to Superman and his kind, not to flesh and blood taxpayers who have to pay the bills. Others have written about how righties live in a kind of childish fantasy world of superheroes, John Wayne, and childish black and white thinking. Any quest to eradicate evil which is by definition always outside yourself and never within is behind this. There are few things more crazy about rightwingers than this immature notion that they are somehow pure and blameless, and all horrors lie outside.Given this approaching day of reckoning, I can see several outcomes:1) the militarists are pushed back by reality2) the militarists lower their costs by replacing troops with robots of various kinds remote controlled drones are an example. I suspect this was part of Rumsfelds’ vision. This will give a whole new meaning to the phrase American war machine . What a boost to unemployed engineers and software people. I suspect this alternative is being feverishly pushed by anyone with a stake in the defense budget.3) the militarism continues as-is, and the rest of American life continues to be shredded to pay for it. Our country’s defense budget exceeds . This includes Russia and China. I’ve read others (Stirling Newberry) say that people in the red states including Newt’s Georgia view the military as an entitlement program. Regardless of where you live, it is a well trod viable path out of an underclass into something resembling mainstream American life (assuming you survive). Sort of like going to college was, for those born after World War 2. Sad, that making war, instead of producing an educated population and presumably a better world, is now America’s biggest contribution.It’s not that evil doesn’t exist, but let’s be realistic, is my plea. Let’s see where all this is going, and decide if this is what we want.