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In last night's Republican presidential candidates' debate, Newt Gingrich pivoted from race-baiting to media-bashing and got as rousing a response from the audience as he had before. Gingrich was harrumphing at CNN moderator John King, who had just asked about Gingrich's second wife's claim that her then-husband wanted an open marriage. Donning the mantle of the angry victim, Gingrich slung this "pious bologna" (to borrow the Speaker's own phrase):
"To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.
"My two daughters, my two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am, frankly, astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate."
Yes, it is hypocritical for Gingrich to project umbrage now, when in 1998, referring to President Clinton's dalliances, Gingrich "pledged to say during every public appearance that Americans have the right to know the truth about the Lewinsky matter and that the president is not above the law." It is also hypocritical, as Rachel Maddow noted, for Gingrich to protest discussion of his personal life when he has been so judgmental about other people's relationships.
I want to underscore a different hypocrisy that seems to have gone unrecognized. Gingrich wants to dictate who gets to count as private, personal, and off-limits even in his own life. He may want to pay homage to the sanctity of marriage, but he gets to decide which of his marriages deserve that hallowed aura. Same for his family members.
Asked last year about his past infidelities by the Christian Broadcasting Network, Gingrich infamously said that he was "partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country." He said that he felt "compelled to seek God's forgiveness." The key point is what he added next:
"I feel that I'm now 67 I'm a grandfather. I have two wonderful grandchildren. I have two wonderful daughters and two great sons in law. Callista and I have a great marriage."
Judge him by his current wife, Callista. As for his former wife (the second one), it was apparently fine to call her a liar. ("The story is false.") Why are we supposed to revere the reigning wife, while trashing the previous ones?
Consider, too, Gingrich's hypocrisy with regard to his other family members. Daughters? Awesome! Sons-in-law? Rah-rah. Grandkids? Aw, how sweet.
But what about Gingrich's sister, Candace Gingrich? Somehow this family member is not covered by the blanket of blessed privacy and honor accorded the other chosen ones. Newt Gingrich, apparently, is happy to use his sister as political fodder. Here is a question from a reporter at the Atlantic magazine, and Candace Gingrich's generous response:
Q: Newt rather famously refused to attend your wedding, but he told you he couldn't make it because he was out of the country. Which do you think was the real reason -- conflicting plans or taking a stand against same-sex marriage?
A: Without looking at when he purchased the plane tickets, I can't say. It was well publicized in 1996 when he was asked if I got married to a woman, would he go to the wedding, and he said no, he wouldn't, because he didn't consider that a marriage. But we got a card congratulating us when we announced our engagement. We got gifts [from Newt and Callista]. We had that family gathering and he and Callista came to it. So I really don't know.
I headlined this post with the claim that this sort of hypocrisy is hardly unique to Newt Gingrich. In fact, I am sorry to say that social scientists, in their attempts to extol the rewards of marrying, also want to tell us which marriages we can consider. With the exception of the most recent article I've been discussing (links are below), researchers who tell us that people who marry become happier, healthier, and all the rest are typically doing one of two things:
(1) In research that compares people of different marital statuses at just one point in time, they are looking separately at the people who are currently married. That means we are all supposed to look away from all those people who married, hated marriage, and got divorced.
(2) In research that follows people over time, they consider separately only those people who got married and stayed married. Getting married, they proclaim, makes you happier and healthier, without adding the qualifier that it is only true for the subset of people who marry and stay that way - and sometimes not even for them.
Is it really fair for Newt Gingrich to say, judge me by this one marriage but not those two? Judge me by these family members but not those? Perhaps that's open to debate. I think it is less debatable whether social scientists should get to make claims about the advantages of marrying while trying to get us to look away from all of the marriages that were decidedly not advantageous.
Note:
Here are the links to my discussions of the very recent study that does report analyses in which all people who got married or started cohabiting were included:
- American marriages: Happiness and health decline over time
- Slighting friends and family: Do couples become less couple-y over time?
- Is cohabitation bad for you? Answers from a 6-year study
- Social scientists do not hear what singles are telling them: Part 1
- Part 2: Social scientists do not hear what singles are telling them
If you haven't already read it, you may also be interested in this:
