IF YOU'VE GOT A HEN HOUSE THAT NEEDS GUARDING...
I've got a very clever fox for you!

You probably think you don’t know a guy who was born Newton Leroy McPherson, but you do indeed know a lot about him. You and most other Americans know he has called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama because he says the Obama administration has overstepped its authority in directing the Justice Department to cease legal defense of Section 3 of DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that President Obama, who happens to be a lawyer whose specialty is constitutional law, has concluded that Section 3 is unconstitutional. The Department has been directed to enforce the broader law (except Section 3) until it is either repealed by Congress or until the courts render “a definitive verdict against the law’s constitutionality.” The man who was once Newton Leroy McPherson has taken verbal shots at the president for his name and his parentage hinting at times that the lunatic fringe may be right in continuing to insist that President Obama is not a legitimate citizen of the United States because his father was Kenyan. Oh, I forgot to mention that the man who was once Newton Leroy McPherson has filed the necessary papers to be a candidate for the office of President of the United States. He now goes by the name of Newt Gingrich. I don’t know and don’t care why he is now Gingrich instead of McPherson. Changing his name is not the problem. One of my best friends has changed his name a couple of times, and I have celebrated the change with him. Name change is not the subject of this writing.

It’s hypocrisy and willful distortion of truth that bothers me. Mr. Gingrich is a college professor, historian; and author who was once Speaker of the House of Representatives, and he knows better than he says or does. He says he considers conjugal love between people of the same gender to be immoral and that if allowed would cause injury to marriages between heterosexual couples. Mr. Gingrich hasn’t commented publicly on what he believes to be the nature of damage to heterosexual marriage. He hasn’t suggested that the failure of his first two marriages was caused by two men loving each other or by two women loving each other. In fact he hasn’t ever said why he believes same gender loving, committed relationships are a threat to marriage. He has suggested that there is something sacred about the term marriage and that the word should be reserved exclusively for legal bonding between a man and a woman.

Mr. Gingrich has been married three times. His first marriage was to his former high school geometry teacher when he was nineteen years old and she was twenty-six. They had two daughters. That marriage ended after Gingrich began an affair with another woman. His first wife says he visited her in the hospital when she was recovering from cancer surgery to go over the details of their divorce. The second marriage ended after Mr. Gingrich began an affair with a House of Representatives staffer who is twenty-three years younger than he is. He is currently married to that woman. The affair with his present wife began before and continued during the time when Mr. Gingrich led the charge against Bill Clinton for his gross indiscretion with a White House staffer. In 2009 Mr. Gingrich’s converted from the Baptist religion of his youth to Catholicism. My guess is that he sees an advantage in appealing to both those groups as he prepares his run for the presidency. Multiple marriages and divorces happen in both of those religious communities even though the official word of both is that divorce is at least discouraged, if not prohibited; so his personal indiscretions can be overlooked and forgiven because they were with a woman. Baptist denominations and the Church of Rome stand firmly together in their belief that homosexuality is an offense against God and that marriage or any other kind of legal bonding between same gender couples must not be considered legal.

So... somebody tell me again how it is that marriage between a man and a woman is threatened or damaged when the state legalizes the union of two men who love each other or two women who love each other. Don’t bother telling me that God is somehow unhappy about it. That’s the opinion of people who say they believe the Gospel of Jesus is simply an extension of Levitical Law, and that both together should be considered a reasonable guide for living. Anybody who believes the ethics outlined in Leviticus and the ethics of the Gospel are compatible hasn’t read the texts or is willfully ignorant... unwilling to apply simple logic. My experience has been that discussion with such a person is usually a waste of time and effort.