By Katie Halper • @kthalps • 12 years ago

Newt Gingrich becomes the poster boy for adultery– literally!

Billboard of Newt Gingrich reads Faithful Republican, Unfaithful Husband
photo from The Morning Call.

Sure, Rick Perry may have the endorsement of the racist, sadistic, and constitution-defying Sheriff Joe Arpaio. But Newt Gingrich has a very special endorser under his belt (no pun intended):  the pro-adultery dating website Ashleymadison.com. “The world’s leading married dating service for discreet encounters” whose motto is “Life is Short. Have an affair,” has endorsed the Newt in a billboard ad for its site in Bucks County, PA. The Billboard features Gingrich and the text “Faithful Republican, Unfaithful Husband. Welcome to the Ashleymadison.comEra.” If you’re looking for a poster boy– or billboard boy– for adultery, Newt Gingrich is your man! He has admitted to cheating on his wives, he’s on number three now, but chocked it up to his love for his country. In one particularly charming adulterous move, he delivered his wife divorce papers while she recovered from surgery from cancer and then married the woman with whom he was cheating on the wife.

Ashleymadison.com’s motives are pro-Newt and pro-adultery. Its founder explained

“Now that Newt is the leading contender in the race for the GOP nomination, we felt compelled to make a point to illustrate how times have changed when a serial divorcee/adulterer is capturing the hearts of the American people…. Gingrich proves that marital fidelity has no bearing on someone’s ability to do a job. Rather than judge him, Americans have finally embraced the reality that affairs are commonplace, and perhaps paradoxically, might be an indication of great leadership to come. He is not the first nor last politician who will step outside of their marriage.”

While I agree that infidelities are common place and shouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with a politician’s political career, that only works for politicians who don’t preach “family values,” and politicians who don’t try to legislate morality. If Newt Gingrich wants to defend the sanctity of marriage as between a man and a woman, which he did most recently in this pledge, that’s fine, but his marriages between a man and a woman with a lot of other women on the side are more than fair game. They are relevant to voters, since they expose Gingrich’s political-personal hypocrisy.

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Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City’s Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comic, writer, blogger, satirist and filmmaker based in New York. Katie graduated from The Dalton School (where she teaches history) and Wesleyan University (where she learned that labels are for jars.) A director of Living Liberally and co-founder/performer in Laughing Liberally, Katie has performed at Town Hall, Symphony Space, The Culture Project, D.C. Comedy Festival, all five Netroots Nations, and The Nation Magazine Cruise, where she made Howard Dean laugh! and has appeared with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon and Jim Hightower. Her writing and videos have appeared in The New York Times, Comedy Central, The Nation Magazine, Gawker, Nerve, Jezebel, the Huffington Post, Alternet and Katie has been featured in/on NY Magazine, LA Times, In These Times, Gawker,Jezebel, MSNBC, Air America, GritTV, the Alan Colmes Show, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once) and the National Review, which called Katie “cute and some what brainy.” Katie co-produced Tim Robbins’s film Embedded, (Venice Film Festival, Sundance Channel); Estela Bravo’s Free to Fly (Havana Film Festival, LA Latino Film Festival); was outreach director for The Take, Naomi Klein/Avi Lewis documentary about Argentine workers (Toronto & Venice Film Festivals, Film Forum); co-directed New Yorkers Remember the Spanish Civil War, a video for Museum of the City of NY exhibit, and wrote/directed viral satiric videos including Jews/ Women/ Gays for McCain.

Katie is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, and New Yorker.

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