Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (27 page)

Cost-Free Moralizing Only

It would be one thing if Republicans were consistent and honest in how they preach of the need for government and law to enforce moral standards and defend “traditional marriage.” That would still be an abuse of the proper role of law, but at least one could say that they were expressing their views honestly. But that is the opposite of what they do. There is nothing at all consistent about the moral positions they espouse. Quite the contrary, they espouse only those moral positions that are politically beneficial to them, that demand moral concessions from small minorities while overlooking and even endorsing the moral deviations of the majority of voters at whom their manipulative claims are aimed.

In November 2005, Texas became the latest state to approve a referendum to incorporate into its state constitution a ban on same-sex marriages. When Texas’s GOP governor, Rick Perry, signed the bill to hold the referendum, he did so at a Christian evangelical school alongside what he called his pro-family “Christian friends.” When asked why he supported the ban, he replied, simply enough: “I am a Christian and this is about values.”

But if Christian values, along with a desire to promote a pro-family agenda, were really the motivations behind the gay-marriage ban, one would expect that these same advocates would be working unceasingly for a ban on divorce and remarriage as well, institutions at least as un-Christian as same-sex marriages. And yet, while more than twenty states have now approved referendums enacting gay-marriage bans into their state constitutions, none of them has voted to prohibit divorce and remarriage, or even to make divorce laws more restrictive.

Quite the contrary, Texas has one of the most permissive divorce laws in the nation. No-fault divorces and second and third marriages—concepts as foreign to Christianity as are same-sex marriages—are not just common but accepted, both socially and under the law. How can Christians possibly allow, and enthusiastically take advantage of, the continuation of permissive divorce laws that plainly violate Christian beliefs?

After all, there is little doubt that Christianity prohibits most divorces every bit as much as it does same-sex marriages. As Dr. Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan, a Methodist minister and associate professor of theology, put it during a 2004 speech on divorce:

Jesus himself explicitly prohibits divorce and remarriage in the New Testament (in Matthew 5:31–32, 19:3–9; Mark 10:11–12; Luke 16:18). For Jesus, remarrying a divorced person constitutes adultery, a serious sin which the entire Bible has much to say about.

Samuele Bacchiocchi, Ph.D., of Andrews University, has written that while some liberal Christians claim there is a narrow exception in the Gospels allowing divorce on the grounds of adultery, there is no question that

The teaching of Jesus is fundamental to the study of the Biblical view of divorce and remarriage because Jesus clarifies the reason for the Old Testament concession (Deut. 24:1) and reaffirms
God’s creational design for marriage to be a permanent, indissoluble covenant….

God’s original plan consists of a man and a woman being united in a marriage bond so strong that the two actually become one flesh (Gen. 2:26; Matt 19:6; Mark 10:8). The “one flesh” unity of the couple is reflected especially in their offspring who partake of the genetic characteristics of father and mother, and the two are absolutely inseparable. Jesus affirms that it is God Himself who actually joins together a couple in marriage and
what God has joined together no human being has the right to separate.

The permanence of the marital union is every bit as fundamental to the Christian concept of traditional marriage as is the requirement of the spouses being of opposite gender. Christians are required, of course, to vow to God to remain with their spouse “till death do us part” and “for as long as we both shall live.” Christian ministers routinely proclaim: “That which God has brought together, let no one put asunder.”

And yet the divorce laws of Texas could not deviate more dramatically from this Christian teaching on marriage. Obtaining a divorce in Rick Perry’s Texas is shockingly easy. Texas law allows no-fault divorce. Under that law, to obtain a divorce, one need merely be able to demonstrate one of two very permissive grounds:

(1) the marriage has become insupportable because of discord or conflict of personalities that has destroyed the legitimate ends of the marriage relationship and prevents any reasonable expectation of reconciliation; or this no-fault ground (2) living separate and apart without cohabitation for 3 years.

That’s all there is to it. If you are a Texas citizen who wants to violate the marital vows you made before God by tearing apart your marital union—a union that, according to Christian doctrine, God has mandated be permanent and indissoluble—all you have to do is claim that you have irreconcilable differences with your spouse, or live apart for three years, and the divorce is yours.

And Texans, like citizens in every state that has banned gay marriages, are taking advantage of these anti-Christian divorce laws with great gusto. While the lowest divorce rate in the country belongs to the first state to legalize gay marriages (Massachusetts, at 2.4 per 1,000 population), Texas is in the top half of states in this respect, with a divorce rate of 4.1. The highest divorce rates, almost uniformly, are in the Bible Belt. Those states that make a flamboyant show of banning gay marriages continue to allow themselves the luxury of divorcing whenever the mood strikes.

Worse, permissive divorce is not only undeniably anti-Christian but, as numerous studies have demonstrated, it is a phenomenon that can shatter the lives of our nation’s children. And yet not only do most pro-family activists focus on gay marriages to the almost complete exclusion of talking about the epidemic of divorce, many of them are themselves divorced and remarried.

It is not difficult to understand what accounts for this transparent gap in consistency when it comes to applying so-called traditional marriage values. The congregations frequented by the likes of Governor Perry are filled with divorced and remarried churchgoers, as are the voting blocs he and the Republican Party need to win elections, as are the mailing lists of the pro-family groups that are most vocal in their opposition to same-sex marriage. When Governor Perry condemns same-sex marriage on the grounds that it violates Christianity, he is condemning very few of his constituents and political allies, since, presumably, very few of them want to enter such a marriage.

Hence we have scads of people sitting around opposing same-sex marriage on the basis of Christianity while their third husbands and multiple stepchildren and live-in girlfriends sit next to them on the couch. And that includes, most prominently, the leadership of the GOP’s Values Voters movement.

Social conservative Ross Douthat of
The Atlantic Monthly
is, like Mike Huckabee, one of the very few voices in that movement to address this hypocrisy and manipulation honestly. In a session he recorded in mid-2007 for BloggingheadsTV, he perfectly explained this important (though almost always overlooked) dynamic in the context of discussing the disparity in the GOP’s treatment of the disgraced gay adulterer Larry Craig (demanding his resignation) and its treatment of the disgraced straight adulterer and prostitute-patronizer David Vitter (supporting him):

The reason that gay rights became a political issue in a way that various other frankly
more important issues having to do with marriage and family life did not—particularly issues about divorce and heterosexual divorce rates
and single parenthood—is that, clearly, it is easier to demonize gay people. And it is much more of an electoral winner.

Obviously, I think the broader conservative concern about family values in American life is correct. I think the way it has manifested itself in our political life is that
nobody wants to be the guy out there telling people—hey, you know, your heterosexual marriage or your out-of-wedlock children are the problem.
It’s much easier to say—here is this particular manifestation that you can easily set aside and say I’m not gay.

The blatantly self-interested, manipulative use of moral issues is rampant in GOP politics, and virtually every national Republican candidate shamelessly milks it for political gain. In late August 2007, a low-level Iowa state court declared unconstitutional that state’s recognition of only opposite-sex marriages. Quite predictably, the GOP presidential candidates fell all over themselves to denounce the decision in the name of traditional marriage.

Here was John McCain the day following the decision:

Today was
a loss for the traditional family,
and I am disappointed that a judge would thwart the will of the people. I have always supported
the traditional definition of marriage
as between one man and one woman.

By contrast, this is John McCain’s real-life defense of marriage, from
Washington Monthly
’s Steve Benen:

McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to
The New York Times’
Nicholas Kristof, “aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich.” McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife’s family money.

And as detailed in
Biography:

McCain married Carol Shepp, his first wife, in 1965. He adopted her two children from a previous marriage, and they have a daughter, born in 1966. The couple divorced in 1980. He and his second wife, Cindy, have four children.

How can John McCain claim to believe that the law should recognize only “traditional marriages” while simultaneously demanding that the law recognize his own second marriage—also known as an adulterous relationship under the precepts of Christianity (Mark 10:11—“And he said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her’”)? Whatever else McCain’s own family is, “traditional” it is not.

And perhaps most ludicrous of all was the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani keeping a straight face as he spent 2007 touting the sanctity of marriage. In September, he made a pilgrimage to the so-called Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., where he spoke privately to social conservative leaders and solemnly pontificated on the importance of marriage and the vital social role it plays. Giuliani’s campaign website explained that he emphatically opposed same-sex marriage because—and this is really what he said—he believes in “preserving the
sanctity of marriage
between a man and a woman.”

Rudy Giuliani—the front-runner throughout 2007 for the Party of Traditional Marriage—is a testament to how pervasively moral issues are so sleazily abused by the Republican Party. Giuliani began his long, winding, varied life of Traditional Marriage by doing something that is illegal in many states: He married his own second cousin, Regina Peruggi. After fourteen years of marriage—the last several years of which they lived apart—Giuliani divorced her and obtained an annulment from the Catholic Church on the ground that he had not received the dispensation required from the Church when its members wish to marry their own cousins.

Next up in the Giuliani sanctity-of-marriage carousel was television news anchor Donna Hanover, whom Giuliani met, began dating, and then moved in with while he was still married to his first wife. Hanover herself had been married and divorced by the time she met Giuliani. Although they had two children together, news reports began surfacing in New York during Giuliani’s tenure as mayor that he was carrying on an adulterous affair with one of his aides, Cristyne Lategano, who is twenty-one years his junior.

As CBS News reported in 2000, in an article titled “The Women in Giuliani’s Life: Donna…Judith…Cristyne…”

The woman Hanover blames for seriously damaging her 16-year marriage to the mayor is former City Hall communications director Cristyne Lategano.

At her news conference, Hanover didn’t mention Lategano by name, but said, “For several years, it was difficult to participate in Rudy’s public life because of his relationship with one staff member.”

Hanover’s spokeswoman, Joannie Danielides, later said her boss was referring to Lategano.

In 1997,
Vanity Fair
magazine reported there was a romantic link between Lategano and Giuliani.

Giuliani had long denied the reports of his adulterous affair with his young aide. But in response to Hanover’s statement blaming Lategano and her lengthy affair with the mayor for the breakup of Hanover’s marriage, Lategano did not bother to deny the accusations, instead simply saying: “I have no desire to speculate why Donna Hanover decided to issue the statement that she did. Understandably, this is a difficult time. I wish both the mayor and Donna Hanover a successful resolution.”

But the most proximate cause of the breakup of Giuliani’s second marriage—the one to the mother of his children—was his adulterous affair with an altogether different mistress, latest wife Judith Nathan Giuliani, who herself was also previously married to another man (with whom she has a child). And the method Giuliani chose for leaving his second wife makes Newt Gingrich’s cancer-bedside-divorce-negotiations look almost humane by comparison. As Steve Benen reported in
Washington Monthly: