Can the pious Christian pastors of America’s Megachurch Heartland(tm) find it in their hearts to gift their presidential-campaign support to a notorious liar and serial adulturer who’s capped thirty years of grifting with a late-life conversion to The Great Whore of Babylon, aka papism, d/b/a the Catholic Church? Dave Weigel at Slate, dealing with these idiots so we don’t have to, explains how they’re finding excuses to embrace the Gingrich:
“I think there’s now an evangelical tri-lemma,” says Jeffress, who still backs Perry but doesn’t have illusions about his current electoral oomph. “Do you vote for a Mormon who’s had one wife, a Catholic who’s had three wives, or an Evangelical who may have had an entire harem?”
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This is a problem. The leadership of the evangelical right, as loose as it is, has the most influence over a Republican nomination in Iowa, in the caucuses. With a month to go, the candidate who said the right things and built the right-sized lead over Romney is Gingrich. Evangelical kingmakers, whom Newt has courted for years, are discussing how to forgive him. The actual voters who’ll pick the candidate aren’t quite so sure…
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This has all been discussed at the higher levels of evangelical politics; it’s largely been litigated. If you read between the lines of evangelical leaders’ statements, they’re incredibly forgiving toward Newt. Look at the open letter that Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote this week. “A high percentage of Evangelical men are willing to cut you some slack over your turbulent marital history,” he wrote. “The bad news is that Evangelical women are far less willing to forgive and let bygones be bygones.”
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How could Gingrich possibly recover? Pretty easily, according to Land. “Mr. Speaker, I urge you to pick a pro-family venue and give a speech (not an interview) addressing your marital history once and for all. It should be clear that this speech will be ‘it’ and will not be repeated, only referenced.”
__
That’s it. The tone is not just forgiving—it’s hopeful that the evangelical hoi polloi can forgive, too. It’s scornful of a media that evangelicals expect to hassle Gingrich and his supporters for hypocrisy. The media didn’t decide whether Paul [the apostle] had redeemed himself. Evangelical leaders won’t let the media tell them whether they can redeem the new Republican front-runner.
I’d kind of like to watch that speech-at-a-pro-family-venue, from a safe distance; given his form, Gingrich would no doubt spend 47 minutes of the allocated hour pontificating on the historical inability of Great Leaders to restrain their insistent, throbbing patriotism to any single ideas-dumpster, rambling through illustrative precedents from the Old Testament Abraham through Thomas Jefferson to Conan the Barbarian. And then cap it off by announcing he had just had divorce papers served on Wife #3, not for health reasons, just because she failed to score well with the marketing panels.
Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly points out that Rick Perry’s campaign, in its best day-late-and-a-dollar-short style, is now targeting Iowa’s “faith” voters. Feh, Perry’s prayers couldn’t even break the drought in Texas — successful prosperity gospel preachers are saving their endorsements for a candidate, be he never so shopworn, with a record of proven results. Fundraising results. Because their God helps those who help themselves, and Newt has helped himself with both hands!
David Koch
They effectively have no choice. Either vote for a scum like Gingrich or a baby-killing, non-Christian, magic-pants-wearing cultist like Mittens.
jl
Dust off an old sermon on Rahab, is all they need to do.
AA+ Bonds
I like this guy, I mean, I don’t like him at all but I like this phrase
Scott Alloway
I live in Philadelphia and am considering changing my registration to R just to play Newt in the primary lottery. What are the odds of win?
Cacti
Serial adultery can be forgiven, provided you have the complexion for the protection.
Just ask brother Cain.
jl
As I remember, there is a Rahab exception clause that allows the otherwise Godly and well mannered and decorous to talk about all sorts of things. I see from the Wiki:
” The Gemara mentions in Tractate Megillah that Rahab was one of the most beautiful women to ever have lived; so much so that simply stating her name twice would bring on immediate ejaculation. This is further clarified by the assertion that this is only the case with those who knew her.[citation needed] ”
Now, good looking does not exactly apply to Newt, but you can talk about all sorts of stuff, and excuse a lot under the Rahab clause.
Rahab clause will cover Newt just fine, as long as he can, firstilly, bring in the bucks, and seondilarily, at least win the primaries (since the general can be a money machine for the pros).
If not, the Newt will be damned as being sinful, old, vile, and ugly, and unhelpful for Christian values.
AA+ Bonds
I’ll say it because people who have never been Catholic usually won’t:
Newt Gingrich’s 11.9999999999th hour conversion, just in time to run for President, marks him as exactly the sort of Catholic convert that every Catholic avoids at the fish dinner, just like Bobby Jindal.
There’s a certain type of late-life American RCC convert who’s always been a self-worshiping zealot, but just now figured out that Protestant-style Donohue-Catholicism puts a veneer of responsibility on the business that just can’t be achieved by baptism into Presbylutheranism, joining the Moonies, etc.
You can tell who they are by the slow Brownian motion of born-and-raised Catholics away from him (always ‘him’) at the fish dinner as the volume of his voice increases to compensate. Even the anti-choice fanatics consider these folks to be low-rent, although as we saw with Louisiana and Jindal, they’ll put up with them from a distance.
Villago Delenda Est
Look, the Talibangicals are all Mammon worshiping assholes, just like Newt.
He’s one of them. That nominal Catholic stuff is irrelevant.
JGabriel
I’m beginning to like the idea of Newt as the Republican Presidential nominee.
If our goal is not only to win another presidential term for Obama, but also for the Democrats to take back Congress, then no one in the GOP field has such long coat tails in Congress to remind people why they hate Congressional Republicans.
So there’s that. Then there’s the idea of a guy named Newt running for President of the United States. The British will never stop laughing at us.
.
Bago
Frankly, I don’t see what all of the fuss is about.
AA+ Bonds
@Villago Delenda Est:
Correct
ant
I came across this comment over at redstate tonight:
Villago Delenda Est
@ant:
By all means, let’s turn all the blacks into self centered greedy assholes. That’s the role model they’re talking about.
That’s what this country needs. More self centered greedy assholes.
Insert two underscores (__) in the space between each paragraph.
AA+ Bonds
@Scott Alloway:
If the Republican candidacy hasn’t been decided by April 24th we will already be well into uncharted waters
Linda Featheringill
I find it interesting that the male evangelicals are willing to forgive Newt but the females are not. This has very little to do with religion and more to do with women recognizing betrayal when they see it.
AA+ Bonds
^ this charmingly sums up right-wing Protestantism in the United States by revealing the basic motivations of its members: the men want to preserve the traditional double standard, while the women long for men to be held to any standard whatsoever
Villago Delenda Est
@ant:
Ah, it DID come out the way I wanted. Anyways underscores, as in…well, you can’t get them to come out that way in the regular text. The shift – character, two of them, in between each paragraph.
jl
@Linda Featheringill: Is there polling data to support that? I hope so.
Part of a good con’s pitch is to lead the mark to believe he is in on the deal. I think Newt is good at that.
Nest talks convoluted nonsense, and if you play along, plays the part of being so gracious and merciful as to let you participate in his genius. That is a nice ride, almost as good as BBQ.
But, some are in a position to read the signs and realize that they are not in on some great deal that they can’t quite understand.
@AA Bonds, thanks for pointing out that part of the post, but is that just some preacher man’s public pitch, or is it true?
AA+ Bonds
I do not doubt that every right-wing evangelical man looked at that question and thought, hey, that’s me, I’m a dirty sinful player pimp after all, while every right-wing evangelical woman looked at that question and thought, please, please, please let the promises that my husband made before God carry any weight whatsoever in a culture where I have no power to sanction him
JGabriel
TPM: Gingrich says he supported mandates to stop Hillarycare.
Doesn’t that kind of give the game away? “I supported one thing to stop health care reform, and when Democrats passed it, I tried to stop that too.” In other words, Newt’s admitting the GOP was never serious about improving health care, they were just serious about stopping any improvement.
.
AA+ Bonds
@jl:
I believe it is both true and something that right-wing Protestants in America, male and female, will read without surprise or really much interest. It’s accepted as common knowledge in that culture that men cheat and women deal with it – disputing this raises the specter of feminism.
In their worldview, produced by both low-level misogyny and high-level recovery of public figures from embarrassing sexual revelations, men are sinners in certain convenient ways, and it is the duty of a woman to be a patient wife who tolerates a husband’s childish pettiness and repeated infidelity.
But the women CAN act out their buried frustrations on other men who aren’t their husbands, as an indirect way of asserting their hope against hope that the family-values rhetoric of the American right might be brought to bear against their own husbands.
ant
@Villago Delenda Est:
thanks
rikyrah
Because Women…
even Evangelical ones..
knows there’s a difference between breakups…
people breakup all the time…
but, it takes a certain KIND of man to deliver divorce papers to his wife IN THE HOSPITAL WHILE HAVING CANCER TREATMENTS…
and, it takes a certain KIND of man to persecute the President of the United States for lying about adultery, all the while you’re bumping and grinding on the floor of the office of the Speaker of the House with a woman WHO IS NOT YOUR WIFE….
AA+ Bonds
I also want to make a real loser of an argument here: I’ve been using “evangelical” to mean “right-wing Protestant” in the same way that Land does, but really their capture of that term is ludicrous considering the incredible success of Catholic evangelism in past decades, or, you know, past millennia
JGabriel
@AA+ Bonds:
I keep wondering how that attitude/cliche manages to stay alive because, ya’ know … the math on that really doesn’t work.
.
rikyrah
UM….
that’s Barack Hussein Obama II
a man who began with nothing…
and worked hard and wound up President of the United States.
A man who obviously loves his wife, and his family, and does nothing but respect them.
But, most importantly, Barack Obama respects himself as a Black man….
Which Herman Cain, the Koch Brothers’ Minstrel did not.
Cain was willing to shuffle along and even break out in song for the right-wing, of course they’re comfortable with him. That they pushed this patently unqualified grifter is nothing but GOP Tokenism at its finest. They want their Black stooge, because they want him to give them cover against their obvious racism.
They also think that Black folks ‘only voted for Barack Obama because he was Black’. Then Senator Barack Obama was the Democratic Nominee for President, and the lowest any Democratic Nominee has gotten of the Black vote in the past 30 years is 85%. John Kerry got, what, 90% of the Black vote? And, if Black folks routinely vote 90-92% for the Democratic Nominee, in order for Barack Obama to get up to 95%, meant that he took away some of the Black REPUBLICAN vote. Now, the only ones who voted for Barack Obama BECAUSE he was Black, were Black Republicans. As the blogger Prometheus6 routinely points out, Black folks voted for Barack Obama not because HE is Black, but because WE are Black and voted in what WE perceived to be OUR best interests.
AA+ Bonds
There was something someone said on here yesterday about how the bizarre focus on Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, etc. reflects the views of right-wing men who see their wives as humorless harridans who keep them from smoking and drinking and fucking hookers like a “real man” does.
That’s pretty much what Richard Land is talking about, in nicey-nice terms: Gingrich’s infidelity does not matter to right-wing Protestant men, who see marital infidelity as an inevitable sin of the male condition that’s washed clean by the Blood of Christ, and who spend a LOT of time and energy protecting that POV as a tenet of “born-again” theology.
All those men want is a good breast-beating story about sin and revelation and redemption, because that’s the story they tell their pastors when gossip gets around that their wives are now staying with their mothers-in-law.
To be a real stereotypin’ dick, this is the relationship ethic of mainstream country music. Just flip on your radio. I say this as someone who manages to enjoy Toby Keith.
Ruckus
How do the religious grifters feel about dealing with a better, nay should I say purer grifter? A grifter who has his own stick, unlike all of them who play the same game? Who has made it pretty pretty far into the grifter hall of fame even after crashing and almost burning? Will they bow down to him and buy his stick? Do they think newt will give them power/fame/fortune if they help him get elected?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
anybody know why Newtie picked Catholicism? Was Calista a papist?
I’ve been told that the idea of sin and redemption carries great appeal to Protestant fundies, which is why Vitter could survive, or at least it’s a gloss they can give to IOKIYAR. It was also why they so loved Bush– “demon rum” is not a metaphor to him and a large number of his supporters. The fusion of religiosity and Thomas Kincaide levels of American sentimentality. Will Newtie get that pass, being a Papist? He’s leading in South Carolina, I believe, which is Fundie Central.
AA+ Bonds
I honestly think this POV on infidelity shapes how American RWPs (right-wing Protestants) view homosexuality.
Look: if you find your husband’s gay porn stash, and he’s irrevocably a homosexual, well then, your life has been shaken to its foundations (and on his part, he knows that he’s cast out of the community).
But: if being homosexual is a CHOICE, it falls conveniently into the same category as heterosexual cheatin’ for RWPs. That is, it’s just something that happens because the Devil sets many snares for the honest Christian, and if your husband just recommits to Christ then tomorrow your straight marriage will be back on track (and on his part, he retains all the benefits of being a married man in RWP culture).
I think this scenario is common enough among RWPs. We’ve all learned quite a bit in recent years about the secret and strong pressure on suspected homosexuals to marry young and produce children.
I think a lot of RWP wives live in dread that their husband is gay.
Gex
@JGabriel: Well some of them, like Ted Haggard, don’t necessarily choose to cheat with a woman. There seem to be a lot of those types of guys in the party that considers it the family values party.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: She is indeed and Newtie wanted to marry her. Heh.
jrg
I like how they’ve decided they will support the GOP candidate, then work backwards from there. Evangelical voters will never figure out they’re being used, will they?
AA+ Bonds
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Because it’s an easy screen for previous infidelity that carries institutional weight.
A third-marriage conversion to anti-divorce views sounds a lot more convincing when you ascribe your newfound “beliefs” to an organization full of men who CAN’T cheat on their wives, talk about how divorce is sin and point to the catechism to prove it.
Of course, you have to ignore the whole child-molesting part, but Newt knows that he probably won’t suffer from that two-degree connection.
AA+ Bonds
I also think that Catholicism probably appeals to Newt personally for the same reason it did to Jindal. Not only is Catholicism now more or less politically equivalent to Protestantism in much of American discourse, it carries a gigantic institution with it that constantly validates and re-validates a unified point of view regardless of the dissent of its members.
This has a real appeal to a pseudo-intellectual with an authoritarian personality.
As I’ve implied above, I’ve met a few of these people through RCIA, which Newt no doubt completed on the fast track. It’s unfair of me, but whenever I meet someone in RCIA who isn’t doing it for a Catholic spouse, I hear alarm bells.
Delia
Newtie really wasn’t much of a Christian of any sort until it became clear that the New Improved Republican Party would not tolerate that sort of apostasy. I’m not sure why he went the Roman route. It certainly closes off the possibility of any future divorces.
It also occurs to me that Mormons tend to be a lot less forgiving of sin than the fundies. You wouldn’t have a Utah or Idaho politician with Newt’s marital record. Aside from the theological fits, that may be one of the reasons the fundies don’t like Romney.
Luthe
@JGabriel: The math works fine as long as you remember that good God-fearing men only cheat because those slutty slut sluts who can’t keep their legs closed tempt them into it (and then run off to have abortions, natch).
To the fundies, it is never the man’s fault. It is always the fault of the temptress who seduces him and the wife who just wasn’t wifely enough to keep him interested. This can only be fixed by the man running back to Jesus and the woman welcoming him back with forgiveness and servitude in her heart. ::gags from having typed that::
AA+ Bonds
@Delia:
It closes off that possibility only until his Presidential campaign (or term) has concluded, which was probably the idea.
I do think you’re right about Mormons, or the perception of them anyway, which is why I think Rove chose Mitt. People forget but we were real close to the edge on Bush’s past in 2000 right up until the election, and if the media had played it differently there might never have been a dispute in Florida to begin with. There’s a belief that a successful Mormon has probably actually internalized prohibitions on infidelity, drinking, etc. Rove is improving on his model.
Roger Moore
@JGabriel:
You can make the math work better than you’d think. You can either have a difference in distribution of partner number or a difference in affair timing. So you might have the stereotypical “loose woman” case, where most women are loyal to their men but a few of them make up for the rest by sleeping around a lot. Or you could have married men having affairs and getting divorced to marry their mistresses, while women wait until after they’re divorced to become mistresses in the hopes they’ll be able to steal another woman’s man. These are both pretty common stereotypes, which may actually have some basis in fact.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@AA+ Bonds:
It seems so at this point, though at 44, I remember in college, a guy my age patiently and earnestly explaining to me that as a Catholic I wasn’t really a Christian. I was taken aback, but looking back, he was probably talking about that “Christ as my personal savior” shit. He was a Jack Daniels-guzzling frat boy, and he sure wasn’t trying to convert me.
This discussion, at this time of year, reminds me of a story from a couple of years ago, fundie churches put on their own version of “A Christmas Carol”, in which the ghosts convince Scrooge to accept Jesus as his personal savior. The idea that Scrooge can be redeemed through Acts rather than Faith is offensive and dangerous.
SiubhanDuinne
@Scott Alloway:
This is off the wall and none of my business and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to — but, by any chance, did you have an ancestor or relative from the Chicago area named Wellington Alloway? Would have been decades ago, I’m thinking early 1940s. Maybe it’s not even your name and maybe he was no kin to you, but I’ve never seen that surname anywhere else and just have to ask.
AA+ Bonds
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You will still see anti-Catholic Chick/knockoff tracts kicking around and your average American “Bible Institute of Biblical Studies, PhD” website will still have a section on Catholicism and exactly why they are idolatrous Satanists – this is sort of equivalent to the insecure frustration that Christians had for centuries over Jews and their failure to convert.
But in the right-wing media, which is Newt’s arena, the usefulness of a certain sort of American Catholic on the abortion/gays/swears-on-TV issue long ago trumped theology or Papist conspiracy theories. Most of those jerks like Ailes, Limbaugh, etc. are almost certainly atheists anyways.
What this means is that mega-churches, and the books their pastors write, are just split enough on the issue to nullify it. Mormonism, now, that’s still considered a major threat.
eemom
@David Koch:
DHS or it didn’t happen.
JCT
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m still waiting to see the gender gap on old Newt. It should be spectacular. Really, most women MIGHT be willing to give him a pass on his first episode (horrid as it was) but TWICE? Both with younger women (and Callista has been turned into some plasticized mannequin in just 12 short years) — clearly Newt is just *great* with women. There is no fucking way that his negatives with women won’t be ugly. Couple that to his “compassion” for poor children and yup, women will be lining up to pull his lever.
Speaking of his “poor children only know crime and should be sent to camps” ideas, where exactly are his new friends in the Catholic Church? Seems like they have some teaching to do — Newt may need remedial CCD.
Steeplejack
@ant:
Put two underscores on the blank lines between paragraphs in the block quote.
ETA: And then chant “FYWP!” Don’t forget that part. It’s very important.
AA+ Bonds
@JCT:
That’s an excellent point.
srv
We must all remember who really screwed up in the Garden of Eden some 6000 years ago, and any good evangelical man is going to find it in his heart to forgive a man, particularly one with his own mind.
Ogami Itto
Poor choice of words, unless the sexual innuendo was intentional. ;)
Dr. Loveless
@JCT:
Didn’t Newt used to get all poetic about Boy’s Town, back in the day? Because putting vulnerable children into an institution under the unmonitored care of the Catholic Church … What could possibly go wrong with that?
And Another Thing...
@AA+ Bonds: What an interesting insight.
One of the things that never made sense to me on the gay marriage debate was the “it’s a threat to marriage.” It was a long time before it occurred to me that what activist fundies were really saying was “it’s a threat to MY marriage.”
By the way, you’re definitely on a roll tonite, lots of great stuff.
JC
So here I come in, comment number 50, and no one has cursed you yet for that grotesque image of Newt’s insistent throbbing patriosm?
Fine, then, it’s up to me – (shaking fist) damn you Ann Laurie!!
Sly
@And Another Thing…:
It’s not even that.
Fundies are against marriage equality because they think any society that is permissive of what they believe to be sin will be bathed in fiery destruction, and those that even dare to look on with tepid concern will be turned into pillars of salt. They’re terrified of not only the possibility that God might take them off his friends list, but that he will actively and ruthlessly destroy them for not adhering to this nonsense. As with nearly all facets of reactionary evangelicalism, it’s a matter of paranoid self-preservation.
Now, there certainly is a spectrum of divinely-inspired resistance to institutionalized heresies. On the one end you have assholes like Rick Santorum who merely make a fool of themselves in public. On the other end you have terrorists like Scott Roeder. But they’re all cut from the same stupid cloth.
WereBear
As though the current President isn’t a role model for all of these things!
buckyblue
This is exactly why, when I was growing up in Jesusland, Evangelical Christians were avoiding politics. There was no way to make an ethical or moral decision, and even when you thought you could, they ended up screwing you in the end anyway. Sermons on Sunday night about how Mormonism was a cult and Catholics were not going to heaven because they weren’t Christians make this choice pretty difficult. Throw in the fact that if you were divorced or caught in adultery, no chance you would ever be a church elder or church chairman, much less even up on the pulpit leading hymns. Evangelicals have compromised so much that dropping the word ‘christian’ when referring to them was a truth-in-labeling move. I didn’t leave the evangelical christian church, it left me.
BruceFromOhio
If that’s the calculus, how about voting for the guy still married to one lady for, like, since *ever*? And is helping raise the two kids?
Unpossible!
@WereBear: Feh. As if.
Jebediah
@rikyrah:
When you contrast that with the bazillions of poor/working class whites who vote against our own best interests, and you have to wonder if maybe there is something to that Bell Curve crap, only the book had it backwards.