Being gay is rated "R"

There's a charming movie coming out called Love is Strange, where John Lithgow and Alfred Molina are partners of 40 years.  Upon marrying, Molina's character is fired from his job as a music teacher for a Catholic school and they lose their home.  They have to split, temporarily, and couch surf with family and friends.

It's by all accounts very charming, with no sex or nudity.  (See the trailer on Video Sunday on this blog, on Sunday 31st.)

But it's rated "R".

The MPAA movie ratings are supposed to provide information on a movie's content, so parents can decide whether or not it's suitable for their children. 

But what kind of information are they really providing? And what are they assuming we want to protect our children from? 

On Friday, "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" will be released in a wide number of theaters. It features nudity, sexual situations and substance abuse. Every woman in it is a stripper, a prostitute or a murderer. There is violence and graphic gore,...It is rated R. 

That day, "Jersey Shore Massacre" also reaches theaters. It features nudity, sexual situations, substance abuse and ethnic and racial slurs. There is violence and graphic gore....It is rated R. 

Also opening is "Love Is Strange." There is no nudity. There are no sexual situations. The drug or alcohol material mostly consists of adults having wine with dinner, or cocktails at a bar. There is no violence or gore. There are several scenes of men kissing, and two scenes of a gay couple sleeping together, fully clothed, in bed. It is rated R. 

If there's an equivalence among these three films, and their equal unsuitability for anyone under 17, it's lost on me — and, I suspect, on anyone but the censors at the MPAA. 

Not only is there nothing violent in "Love Is Strange," there's not even anything explicit. It is about as mild and mainstream a portrayal of gay life as you can imagine. Ben, played by John Lithgow, is a 71-year-old retiree. George, played by Alfred Molina, is a music teacher at a Catholic school. In the film, they have been together for nearly 40 years (until, in a unfair and sudden reversal of fortune, they lose their apartment).

It's a simple human story. And it is very hard to imagine that — if it starred, say, Robert Duvall and Jane Fonda as a similar long-time couple suddenly facing homelessness — it would be lumped in with movies crammed full of queasily stylish sexism and sickening torture porn.
.....
This is a gentle, if often heartbreaking story about two loving men in a long-time committed relationship. What on earth is in it that so horrifies the MPAA?
I'm sorry. I think I just answered my own question.

IOKIYAR, or when does a VA Attorney General have to defend a law?

The conservatives are up in arms because the new Attorney General of Virginia,  Mark Herring, refuses to defend the state's cruel anti-gay union law.  The AG considers it unconstitutional.

Never fear, the law will be defended by the Usual Suspects, thanks to several clerks also named in the suit. In fact, arguments were heard yesterday.

Let's have a quote from the Virginia A/G:

“I will not defend what I, in my judgment, deem to be an unconstitutional law.” “If I determine it not to be constitutional,” he explained [in a debate], “I will not defend it. My first obligation is to the Constitution and the people of Virginia.”  (source)

Oops .... I'm sorry.

That wasn't a quote from (Democrat) Mark Herring, but from his (Republican) predecessor, Ken Cuccinelli.

Apparently, it's okay to refuse to defend a law that you consider unconstitutional if you are a Republican A/G.  It's just a problem if you are a democrat.

The stench of hypocrisy....

(More from ThinkProgress)

Congress spends YOUR money to defend DOMA, ctd

You know how the Republicans are all for smaller government, and less government spending?  But that's not if government spending can marginalize the gays.  THAT, and they're all in favor.

From the HuffPo:

House Republican leaders have signed on to spend up to $3 million to keep defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, according to a copy of their newly revised legal contract obtained by The Huffington Post.  

House Republican leaders took over the legal defense of DOMA in the spring of 2011, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Obama administration would no longer defend it on the grounds that they found it unconstitutional. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders hired attorneys at the law firm Bancroft LLC to represent the House in court cases involving the federal ban on gay marriage -- all with taxpayer dollars....

House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, sent a letter to Boehner later Tuesday voicing their opposition to sinking more money into DOMA's defense -- particularly given Republicans' calls for fiscal responsibility. 

"We wish to strongly reaffirm our objections to the repeated actions by the Republican leadership to secretly and dramatically increase the contract between the House and outside counsel in arguing to uphold the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in more than a dozen cases," reads the letter from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). 

"It is the height of hypocrisy for House Republicans to waste public funds in one breath then claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility in the next," the letter continues. "With Republicans willing to take our economy and our country to the brink of default in the name of deficit reduction, there is simply no excuse for any Member of Congress to commit taxpayer dollars to an unnecessary -- and futile -- legal battle."

Romney and ENDA

The big discussion in the blogosphere has been the SEcret Meeting between Mitt Romney and the Log Cabin Republicans, in which apparently Mitt promised the LCR that he would support ENDA (the non-discrimination act, that would prevent gay people from being fired for the sole reason that they are gay), if the LCR endorsed him.

 Predictably, this has gotten out.

 No one on "our" side believes Mitt, who flipflops faster than a dying trout, while the fundies are outraged, outraged! That Mitt is actually saying anything remotely (and it is remote!) supportive of Teh Gayz. Mitt is...saying nothing.

 Popcorn?

Christians cannot claim persecution

Religious persecution is when you're prevented from exercising your beliefs - not when you're prevented from imposing your beliefs."   The Rev. Susan Russell.

From the HuffPo;

[I]t is reprehensible how many American Christians have recently claimed that they too are being "persecuted." Not for proclaiming a faith in Jesus Christ, but for supporting causes and issues that Jesus never said a word on. Specifically, some Christians are claiming that their religious freedom is being infringed, and they're facing persecution, because they aren't able to vocally support oppression toward homosexuals without facing opposition.

Not opposition from the government -- no one is threatening to remove the tax exemption of every church who urges it's congregation to vote against gay marriage -- but opposition from "the world." ....

These are the same Christians who, led by Mike Huckabee, flocked in droves to Chick-fil-A a couple weeks ago ....The words that inspired thousands of Christians to get out and do something weren't words about Christ at all, they were words meant to oppress a group of people long discriminated against by Christians. But the ones claiming persecution the loudest weren't the LGBT people Cathy had spoken against, but the Christians who were doing the oppression.

.... Until Christians endure the same threats, mocking and ostracization that their LGBT brothers and sisters face every day, they can't claim they're being persecuted. Especially since those threats, the mocking and the ostracizing that LGBT people face almost always comes from Christians themselves.

Hypocrites Hall of Fame

Do you ever wonder why it's always Republicans who get caught in gay sex scandals?  It's the pernicious effect of the closet.  There's a need in some gay men to validate their choice to remain in the closet, and use it as a sniper's nest against those of us who live honestly.   And, since many of them only have sordid and anonymous sex, rather than real relationships, they assume that's all any of us have.

Salon has a great slideshow of a number of Republican snipers who worked in the past, or are working against LGBT rights.

Here's a great quote, from Barney Frank about CA representative David Dreier, who is widely assumed to be gay.

When Barney Frank was asked if Dreier was not elected House majority leader because he was too “moderate,” Frank replied: “Yes, in the sense that I marched in the moderate pride parade last summer and went to a moderate bar.”

Who really defends the Constitution?

Following upon on Chris Christie's veto of marriage equality in New Jersey, and the remarkable idea in contravention to the Constitution that a minority should have its rights voted on by the majority: Andrew Sullivan points out how the minority opposed to marriage equality keeps changing the rules, and can't even manage to be consistent in their "pro-Constitution" views. (My emphasis)

They moved the goalposts on us. When we actually began to win in state legislatures, such as California (twice!), or New Hampshire, or now Maryland and New Jersey and Washington State, that process became suddenly unacceptable - and undemocratic! - as well. Even on an issue many hold to be a core civil right, we were told the courts were irrelevant and now that the legislatures were irrelevant. This was particularly odd coming from conservatives who at one point in time were strong believers in restraints on majority tyranny. But this is what a legislative debate can do that no referendum can, and it's why the founders established a republic not a pure democracy:

...But the way in which a tiny 2- 3 percent minority seeking basic civil equality has been forced now to be subject to state referendums, even after winning legislative victories, strikes me as revealing. It's basically an attack on representative government, a resort to the forms of decision-making which maximize the potential for anonymous bigotry and minimize the importance of representative government, a core achievement of Anglo-American democracy, that can help enhance reason of the accountable against the sometimes raw prejudice of the majority.

Christie is a man whose candor I admire in many ways. But this was an act of cowardice and unfairness and a misguided disregard for representative democracy. How many other duly enacted laws must now be sent to the referendum process for final judgment. Why have a legislature at all? And this from the party that claims to defend the Constitution.

When religious freedom conflicts with civil law

 I bet you think I"m going to talk about same sex marriage here. I'm not, much. I'm going to give you some examples where devout religious belief conflicts with the standards of public life, and have you consider how these conflicts are treated. The analogy to same sex marriage is obvious.

 In New York, ultra-orthodox Jews believe in strict separation of the sexes. Women are expected to dress very conservatively . A firestorm erupted last fall when it turned out that a bus company with a franchise on a public route was enforcing a segregated bus, and sending women to sit in the back. Since the bus company was functioning as a contractor to the city, it is not allowed to discriminate.

 So, does the desire of the ultra-orthodox to be separated from women require that women not of their faith must sit in the back of the bus, wear long skirts, or step aside in front of men, in a public space?

A letter to the ultra-orthodox community in Crown Heights New York asks landlords to rent only to fellow Jews and not to "yuppies" or "goyim" who do not cover themselves properly. Yet housing law clearly dictates one may not discriminate in renting on the basis of race or religion.

 So, does the desire not to be exposed to people of another faith and belief justify ignoring non-discrimination laws?

 In Roman Catholic doctrine, marriage is viewed as indissoluble, and remarriage after civil divorce is not allowed. As it says on the website of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, unless there is an annulment, "no person is free to enter into another marriage without the appearance or occasion of serious sin." Indeed, should a divorced person remarry without an annulment, they are in an "adulterous union" and grave moral sin, and should not expect to participate in the sacraments of the church. (my emphases)

One final situation is that of those who have repented of their illicit union, but remain together for a serious reason, such as for the sake of their children. Catholic pastoral practice allows that IF their pastor judges that scandal can be avoided (meaning most people are unaware of their remarriage and consider them a married couple), then they may live together as "brother and sister" (without any sexual relations), and be admitted to the sacraments. If scandal can not be avoided, then they must either separate or refrain from the sacraments.

So, do you think that the Roman Catholic hospitals and charities check the marital status of their employees? 


 Do they provide insurance for the spouses of employees who are civilly divorced and remarried?

Those marriages are considered invalid by Catholic doctrine--just like marriages between same sex couples.

 And why aren't they advocating to prevent civil divorce? Could it be (gasp) because so many straight Catholics are divorced, and have managed to obtain an annulment?


What do we owe religious tolerance and freedom in the public square?

Hypocrisy alert from Catholic Bishops

Item 1:

The Hartford Archdiocese wants gays and lesbians to practice abstinence in the new year. 

On Tuesday, the archdiocese announced it was launching a local chapter of a national ministry called Courage "to support men and women who struggle with homosexual tendencies and to motivate them to live chaste and fruitful lives in accordance with Catholic Church teachings."... 

Item 2:

The pope has accepted the early resignation of a Los Angeles bishop who recently acknowledged being the father of two teenagers. 

Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala, 60, resigned Wednesday ...
In a letter to the faithful, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez said Zavala had told him in December that he had two children who lived with their mother in a different state. Zavala subsequently submitted his resignation to the pope.

Do as I say, not as I do?

Why it matters: military families

Charlie Morgan is a married woman in active military service.  She has breast cancer.

Even with repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the pair face all sorts of limitations not imposed on opposite-sex military couples. Because of the Defense of Marriage Act, for example, Karen Morgan is denied health coverage worth well in excess of $10,000 a year. She also cannot get a base pass that would let her escort their 4 1/2-year-old daughter to medical appointments on base or shop at the commissary. 

These serial injustices are especially concerning now that Charlie Morgan’s cancer has returned. She worries about how her family will manage if she dies, since the law denies same-sex spouses death and survivor benefits. In the fall, she became a named plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act’s denial of equal protection. 

“I have a question I’d like to ask John Boehner,” Charlie Morgan said, taking note of the House speaker’s decision to spend taxpayer money for lawyers to defend the act. “I’ve proved I’m willing to put my life on the line for my country. When will he allow the military to protect my family?

We're waiting, Speaker Boehner, and candidate Santorum.  Just how does  hurting Charlie's family "protect" marriage?

The Chicago Catholics and Religious Freedom

Enough with this religious freedom argument already!  As I've told you before, it is specious as well as illogical.

FACT:  you are all free to practice your religion any way you choose.   


Regardless of the hyperbole, no one is, or will, ever step foot into any church and force them to marry anyone they don't want to.  After all, the Roman Catholics are free to deny marriage to anyone divorced, even though marriage following divorce is civilly legal.  No divorcé is suing the church for marriage, are they?

• Actually, what they are doing is buying "annulments", kinda like indulgences, which is why serial adulterer and thrice-married Newt Gingrich is now a Roman Catholic.  Note to cardinals, do you really think Newt is the best examplar of the meaning of marriage?

What you are NOT free to do is:

• force anyone else to practice your religion.
  For example, lots of faith groups disagree with the Roman Catholics about who can marry. The Episcopalians allow divorced people to remarry in the church, and in many jurisdictions where it's legal, they allow LGBT people to marry, neither of which are allowed under of Roman Catholic doctrine. Same for the MCC, the UCC, the Lutherans, reform Jews, etc etc etc. These faith groups should be free to practice THEIR faith, not be forced to be unwilling Roman Catholics. 



• get the government to pay for it.
  Yes, we know that Catholic Charities in IL is shutting down, rather than let gay people adopt children-- but they do not have a constitutional right to federal funding.  Catholic charities are more than free to keep providing discriminatory adoption services, if they choose to pay for it.  They just aren't perfectly free to keep using my gay taxpayer's dollars to fund discrimination against other gay people. 

And let's be very clear; this is a choice.  As the NY Times points out, 

Taking a completely different tack was the agency affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod, which like the Catholic Church does not sanction same-sex relationships. Gene Svebakken, president and chief executive of the agency, Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois, visited all seven pastoral conferences in his state and explained that the best option was to compromise and continue caring for the children.

That is, you can keep taking public money and compromise.  You can not take public money, and do as you please.  Or you can shut down and scream "martyr!"

Here's the basic fact: claiming that you are being discriminated against, if you are not allowed to discriminate against others, is like killing your father and claiming sympathy for being an orphan.

Update:  Jay Bookman, writing in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

...the church is not being persecuted. It is not persecution to be held to the standards that are applied to every other contractor that does business with the state. To the contrary, the church is demanding “special rights” to violate the law and to use taxpayers’ money to do so.  

Why it matters: Ed Watson dies without equality

From the LA Times:

Derence Kernek and Ed Watson became prominent faces in the California gay community's campaign for the right to marry when they urged a federal appeals court earlier this year to halt the enforcement of Proposition 8 so they could wed before Watson succumbed to advancing illness. 

On the eve of a Thursday hearing on challenges to a 2010 ruling that the voter initiative banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, Watson died at age 78 of complications from Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and hypertension. 

Gay rights activists lamented Watson's death as a reminder of the harm inflicted on same-sex couples throughout the state because they are denied the right to marry.

So, I'm sure NOM founders Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher are happy over this. After all, Ed and Derence  have been devoted to each other for 40 years, but have been prevented from irrevocably damaging marriage, while Brian is off supporting marriage by supporting the campaign of serial adulterer Newt Gingrich.  Hypocrisy, much?

Town Clerks and Religious Freedom

You remember the town clerk in New York who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because it offends her religion? She compares it to issuing a license to steal.

So if this is a religious freedom issue, let's make it very clear.

If Ms Belforti's religion disapproved of interfaith marriages, would she issue a Jew and aChristian a license?

If Ms Belforti's religion disapproved of remarriage following divorce (which, if she's Roman Catholic, it does), would she issue a divorcé a license?

If Ms Belforti's religion disapproved of inter-racial marriages, would she issue a black and a white a license?

If Ms Belforti's religion disapproved of Roman Catholic marriages, would she issue a Catholic a license?

What if a gay Episcopalian couple wanted to marry? THEIR religion allows it....sort of....

Ms Belforti, what is the limit on "religious freedom"?

The REAL threat to marriage

While NOM and others fulminate against LGBT couples marrying, they might do better to look at the horrific effects that the recession has on marriage (not to mention conservative policies that disadvantage the poor and jobless).

From the Atlantic, last year but still current:

[J]oblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in general, he says, “if men can’t make a contribution financially, they don’t have much to offer.” Two-thirds of all divorces are legally initiated by women. Wilcox believes that over the next few years, we may see a long wave of divorces, washing no small number of discarded and dispirited men back into single adulthood.

Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But “the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,” Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.

Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.”

Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried. For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University, recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities,” Edin told me, “including white communities. And where it’s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you’re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don’t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

What was that about "every child deserves a mother and a father"?

Lies, Damn LIes, and the Religious Right

One of the memorable moments of the DOMA hearing was Sen. Al Franken calling out the mis-representation of the data by Tom Minnery, of Focus on the (right wing heterosexual) Family.

Blogger Alvin McEwen points out that the mis-representation of data by those opposed to equality is an ongoing issue. Over and over again, they pull this off.  It's way passed time to call them on it.  McEwen has a great post with documentation:

Minnery's misreading of study in order present a bad picture of same-sex households is commonplace in religious right data. Often times, religious right spokespeople will cite studies which have nothing to do with same-sex households in order to claim that these households are not the best place to raise children....

And we're not just talking about studies regarding households, either.When groups like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, or the National Organization for Marriage aren't busy scaring people with how the gay community wants to "recruit children," they busy themselves distorting all sorts of legitimate data, creating conclusions that the researchers never intended or worked for.

We know this because at least 11 of these researchers complained....

These are the reasons why many of us are celebrating Franken's dressing down of Minnery. It revealed to so many what a lot of us in the gay community have known about the religious right for years - that all of their talk about "morals" and "values" and "personally held religious beliefs" are a dodge. They are a smokescreen which these organizations use to hide their deceptions.

When it comes to the gay community, the vast majority of religious right studies and data have been fallacious distortions designed to exploit fear, not educate.

You should bookmark McEwen's blog, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters. He's a bulldog in exposing the lies.

Not mine, yours (Cartoon)

THe hyposcrisy of opposition to same sex marriage

(reposted from last week)
WE saw George W Bush and his schemers use The Gays as a boogey man to energize the right, to our cost. It's a pretty deliberate scheme, and it still goes one...but what it leads to is a fundamental hypocrisy. From the LA TImes

Social conservatives say they're trying to address the problems of family breakdown, crime and welfare costs, but there's a huge disconnect between the problems they identify and the policy solutions they propose. It's almost like the man who looked for his keys on the thoroughfare, even though he lost them in the alley, because the light was better....

As a 2009 Heritage Foundation report stated, children born to single mothers "score lower on tests, have increased chances for committing a crime, have higher chances of living in poverty, experience more emotional and behavioral problems, are more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol and have higher chances of becoming pregnant as teens." And social problems like that do tend to lead to higher government spending.

But those problems have nothing to do with abortion or gay marriage, the issues that social conservatives talk most about.

Abortion may be a moral crime, but it isn't the cause of high government spending or intergenerational poverty. And one thing gay couples are not doing is filling the world with fatherless children. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that allowing more people to make the emotional and financial commitments of marriage could cause family breakdown or welfare spending.

Calling out the hypocrisy in Illinois (video Sunday)

Illinois State Senator Rickey Hendon on the Civil Unions bill in Illinois. Preach it, brother.

Judicial impartiality and Prop8

The Bad Guys argued that Judge Vaughn Walker couldn't be fair in the original Prop8 finding, because he is reputed to be gay. By their logic, only straight white Christian men can be fair.

Some on our side argued that because Judge Randy Smith, one of the three 9th circuit judges scheduled to hear the Prop8 appeal next week, might be Mormon, that he should be suspect. Fortunately this was shot down as completely inappropriate, for exactly the same reasons that the other side's protest against Judge Walker was unjustified. It doesn't matter.

But the Bad Guys don't believe that. WHile they would have yowled if our side had protested Judge Smith, they next demanded that Judge Stephen Reinhardt, another of the panel, recuse himself because his wife works for the Southern California ACLU. Judge Reinhardt said "no".

Funny how the conservatives believe such rules only apply to liberals. On the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas's wife ran the tea party group Liberty Central. More directly concerning are the actions of Justices Thomas and Scalia, who themselves attended conservative political meetings organized by the mysterious Koch brothers, and Justice Samuel Alito, who actively participates in conservative fundraising.

IOKIYAR, I guess.

Newt Gingrich and the sanctity of marriage.

You may recall that Newt Gingrich converted to Roman Catholicism last year. The same Newt Gingrich who attacked Bill Clinton for unseemly affairs is now an advocate for family values and the sanctity of marriage, and setting himself up for a run at the White House in 2012. What's the problem? Well, ol' Newt is on Marriage # 3.

The Daily Beast:

Mr. Gingrich’s marital history is a matter of public record, and it is not tidy. He first married at age 19, to his 26-year-old former high-school geometry teacher and then, so the story goes, presented her with divorce terms after she was wheeled out of cancer surgery.

Mrs. Gingrich #2 was dumped after her husband had carried on an extramarital affair with a fetching, blond congressional staffer named Callista Bisek, who went on to become the present Mrs. Gingrich #3. This Family Values paradigm was complicated by the fact that whilst Mr. Gingrich was filibustering Ms. Bisek over the Speaker’s desk, he was simultaneously leading the impeachment charge against a naughty president of
the United States.

To be sure, Mr. Gingrich has since been at pains to emphasize that it was not Mr. Clinton’s naughtiness that he minded, but his perjury. Well, OK, but really, sir. As the noble Rochefoucauld taught us, “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”

This marital history was a bit problematic because Mrs Gingrich #3 is a Roman Catholic and wanted a blessing on her marriage. What to do, what to do? Ah..... annulment.

Mother Church can be rigid, but at times—bless her—she can think like a $700-an-hour K Street lawyer. ...

As the Rev. John Catoir, a doctor of canon law, points out, “Forty years ago, people were told ‘You made your bed, now sleep in it.’” Thank God this is no longer the Church’s guiding philosophy. If the church had been this progressive in the matter of annulments back in the 1530s in merry olde England, the Archbishop of Canterbury would today be a Roman cardinal.

Really? Well, yes, apparently so. As Mrs Gingrich # 2 explained to Esquire, Newt invited his mistress (the future #3) to live with him while still married to #2. He asked #2 to ignore the affair and let him continue it. She refused, and they divorced. And then, the ever considerate Roman Catholic church annulled the marriage, without any input from her.

It's hysterical. I got a notice that they wanted to nullify my marriage. They're making jokes about it on local radio. The minute he got married, divorced, married, divorced — what does the Catholic Church say about this?

Apparently, not much. Newt's previous marriages--both of them--hey presto! vanished, and he and #3 can be blessed in church. I'm all in favor of absolution, but pretending something never happened?

Even hard-right Republican Sen Tom Coburn has a bit of an issue with this.

Coburn made it clear that he won't be on Newt Gingrich's 2012 presidential bandwagon. Gingrich "is a super-smart man, but he doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage," he said of the thrice-married former House speaker. "He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States. His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president."

Ouch.

It should be entertaining to see how Newt Gingrich spins his marriages. The portrait of him that comes from the Esquire story is of a cynical, calculating, egotist in the "do as I say, not as I do" mold. The right wing is good at spinning but this one is going to cause whiplash.

Popcorn?