Posted on 01/24/2012 10:24:29 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Should marital fidelity matter in a political candidate? And yes, I am talking about Newt Gingrich. There are many who would scoff at the notion.
Certainly, there were a large number present at the Republican primary debate who delighted in booing down John King when he questioned Gingrich on his ex-wife's allegations. A delight that was only surpassed when their favored excoriated the value of the question and the questioner, with a perfect fury that smacked more cold calculation than any true genuine emotion. For as Mr. Gingrich was undoubtedly already well aware, his greatest positive exposure throughout the campaign to date has come when he has rounded on the hopelessly biased left-dominated mainstream media, and let loose with both barrels. And didn't Mr. King's question give Mr. Gingrich the perfect opportunity to do just that?! Enabling Mr. Gingrich to garner to kind of publicity that no amount of money can buy. Publicity which carried him to victory in the election that followed.
And what an election it was! One in which people lined up to cast their ballot. Voting not so much against the "injustice" which had been perpetrated upon Newt Gingrich. But more against the morally and intellectually bankrupt fawning coverage that has been employed by the bulk of the media to carry Obama administration these past years. Coverage for which Mr. Gingrich courtesy of John King, had now perfectly positioned him as the poster child against. Yes, a vote for Newt was indeed a vote against the left media. And my, how they voted!
At least, we can but hope that that was what motivated them. Otherwise, a man who has employed some of the most despicably divisive leftist tactics ever used by a conservative candidate has a significant swell of support!
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I’m going to try to make my reasoning clear here.
Sarah Palin was my first choice for president, but the left, the GOP-E and many right here on FR wouldn’t have it. They trashed her and her family relentlessly with some of the unholiest filth and lies imaginable. Even so, I did little about it. I felt it was best to let the debate run its course and the best hard ass conservative would rise to the top. Well, they drove her completely out and she didn’t run. Didn’t want to subject her family to such suffering.
Then one by one, they did the same thing to Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Santorum driving their support numbers down and Perry, Cain and Bachmann out of the race. As each one took their turns as our leading non-Romney conservative they were relentlessly attacked, trashed and driven out.
Looked like we were repeating 2008 and were going to be stuck with a loser RINO again. We’re running out of conservative candidates and I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow Free Republic to be used to drive out our last remaining best conservative shot of defeating both Romney and Obama!!
Then a funny thing happened. Newt Gingrich, whom they’d left for dead, arose from the grave and began smiting the heathen. He’s back as a hard as nails, no nonsense, bad ass, battle scarred, conservative veteran of two conservative revolutions, the Reagan Revolution of the 80s and then his own Republican Revolution of the 90s. And they were both hugely successful for us.
I’ve looked at Newt’s plan. It’s Reagan’s plan on steroids. Radically reduce government, regulations taxes and spending, restore constitutionally limited government, restore states rights, restore individual rights, restore economic freedom, restore American excellence, whack and dethrone the liberal activist judiciary and get the government the hell off our backs, out of our lives and out of our religion.
Securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity!!
Now what is there not to like?
We are rebels trying to take back our freedom or aren’t we?
Rebellion is ON!!
Join or die!!
Don’t tread on me!!
There are many things that should matter and there will be no candidate that will live up to 100% of our expectations 100% of the time, which will always leave our decision about a candidate as a result of our reflections on a spectrum of values and issues, hoping to pick one who, in sum, seems better, in summary, than the rest.
There are no saints, except maybe in heaven, but certainly not in politics.
Politics ain’t beanbag!
I realize that, Senor.
I'm running for public office right now.
Wish me good luck and Godspeed if you so choose.
But I'll just look at the $500 million dollars in tax money that BO stole to pay off his Solyndra campaign contributors and those two big negatives cancel each other out.
I can do this sort of moral accounting for each of Newt's foibles or sins, and still not get past breakfast, day one of the Obama Administration.
Newt's treats his wives like crap, but so does my car mechanic. I just need to know he can fix the car.
Prayers up!
Say what??? I had not heard that. Will have to look it up.
There's a difference between someone with a complete lack of character and someone with a character flaw that he prayed God would correct.
You will soon have freepmail.
Thank you for your fair wishes.
And I think our bag would still win!
And I mean **REALLY** appreciate it. The background explanation helped on this a lot. What you say makes lots of sense.
Mitt Romney must be stopped and after South Carolina, it looks like Gingrich may be the man to do it. I strongly believe that if Gingrich is going to be the nominee, we've got some really hard work to do in the next few months. We've got to deal with the social conservative part of the Republican Party, of which I count myself a member, having made a very deliberate decision decades ago, despite being the son of a Republican politician, to reject the ties I inherited to the Ford wing of the party.
After I posted the (now deleted) link to an article from World Magazine last night that is considerably less critical than this link to American Thinker, I checked again this morning and saw the comments section at World for that article is now filled with really nasty stuff. Even worse, there's lots of unrealistic stuff posted there saying basically that it doesn't make any difference whether a candidate wins or not, we just need to vote for the most faithful person regardless of the consequences.
That's the way to lose elections, and too many of my brothers and sisters in the Christian conservative movement simply don't seem to “get it.”
I have attended church with Janie Cheaney for half a decade and I know she doesn't believe the things being written in the comments section of her article. I dealt with Joel Belz nearly two decades ago in church work, I've read Marvin Olasky’s writings, and I know they and many others on the World Magazine management team are masters at both ecclesiastical and secular politics, and they know better, too.
But that doesn't mean the people in the pews do — South Carolina voters notwithstanding.
we've simply got to get those votes this November. Numerous key states depend on razor-thin margins in which lower-middle-class or blue collar evangelical voters have socioeconomic reasons to vote Democrat and need a strong religious reason to vote Republican. That's the old Reagan Coalition of northern ethnic Catholic Democrats, combined with rural white evangelical Southern Democrats. Too often they stay home on election day, and that's a big part of why McCain lost.
In hindsight, maybe what I need to do is spend a lot more time arguing with my fellow evangelicals on the World Magazine website and similar forums than doing it on Free Republic. That's where the problem lies, and many of those people are not reading Free Republic anyway since it's “not spiritual enough” or “uses bad language.”
Well, sorry. Politics is war, and because our enemies aren't nice, we can't be either. I learned worse language growing up at Republican Party meetings that I've ever heard around an Army installation, and while I don't encourage bad language, I do encourage aggressive behavior against an enemy who wants to destroy us.
That enemy is Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney is, at best, a lousy candidate to put up against him. At worst, he's Obama-lite, and that's where I think he really is based on past policies.
“, a man who has employed some of the most despicably divisive leftist tactics ever used by a conservative candidate “
How the Hell did he go from a title of fidelity to that?? He never presented any facts to support that statement. “American Thinker”? I don’t think so.
Hey little one! I’m doing ok. Hope you and your loved ones are doing well.
Some other denominations have strict conditions but not to the degree you explained. In the Episcopal Church a priest cannot marry a divorced person without his bishop's written permission and if adultery was involved permission is denied. I'm not sure about the current church, but that is the way it used to be.
Really?! Then that does change everything. I don’t know why I thought she had died. I should have checked. It was easy enough to find out, once you called me out on it. Thank you for making me get my facts on the case straight.
Nevertheless the principles I stated remain true. I should have checked to see if Jackie is still alive before I applied the principles to his situation, since it changes in some pretty important ways.
When an adult is received into the Catholic church, any purported marriages need to be clarified. If Jackie had died, my original analysis would have been the way to go. However, since she is still alive, Newt’s marriage to her would be presumed to be valid. And since he did not get an annulment before he married Marianne, his civil marriages to Marianne and Callista would clearly not be sacramentally valid.
Since Newt and Callista had no intention of separating when he converted to Catholicism, he would have to demonstrate to the Church that his marriage to Jackie was not sacramentally valid and that he was free to enter a sacramental marriage with Callista. I don’t know on what basis that annulment was granted, but from the public evidence, I can easily think of two possible reasons:
1. At the time he married Jackie, he may not have ever had the intention to remain sexually faithful to her. He may have presented other evidence, not publicly known, to support that claim.
2. His relationship with Jackie was unusual, to say the least, in ways that might have had a profound effect on his ability to have the necessary understanding of matrimony to enter into a sacramentally valid marriage with her. Newt and Jackie had started a sexual relationship when he was only 16 years old, and while she was his high school math teacher. There are all sorts of potential psychological impediments that could interfere with a 19 year old man’s ability to freely commit to marriage with woman seven years older than him, who happened to be in a position of authority over him, and with whom he had been sexually active for 3 years.
Whether these are the reasons the annulment was granted are mere speculation on my part. What is not speculation is that to enter the Catholic Church and continue living with Callista, Newt’s marriage to Jackie would have had to be declared invalid, and he would have had to enter a sacramental marriage with Callista. Anything less would be a lack of a sincere intention to live according to the teachings of Christ.
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