Bad Boys, Nasty Boys: Out of the GOP’s Closet

by Michael Parenti


Republican party politicos espouse an unflagging devotion to old-fashioned morality and family values, inveighing heavily against gay marriage, abortion, homosexuality, adultery, feminism, crime, stem-cell research, secularism, and liberalism-all of which they tend to lump together as different facets of the same evil decadence.

GOP leaders dilate on the need to “put God back into public life.” Many of them even claim to be directly guided by their deity’s mandate when legislating and governing. Their private deeds, however, frequently betray their words. Consider this incomplete sampling of politically prominent “social conservatives” who preach the conventional virtues to their constituents while practicing something else in their off-hours.

Recently-deceased Representative Henry Hyde, Illinois Republican, played a key role in the impeachment campaign waged against the adulterous president Bill Clinton. The several obituaries I read about Hyde failed to mention that he a six-year liaison with a young married mother of three children. The woman’s former husband blamed Hyde for the divorce that followed from the affair, and for the emotional damage inflicted on his children. Hyde dismissed the affair as “a youthful indiscretion”—it having ended when he was just a callow youngster of 43 or so. In 1992, Hyde divorced his wife of 45 years. Soon after that she died and he quickly remarried.

Representative Bob Livingston, Louisiana Republican, married with four children, resigned as House speaker-elect after his marital infidelities made the headlines in 1998.

Speaker of the House, Republican Newt Gingrich, led the charge against the philandering Clinton while himself carrying on an affair with a congressional aide. Gingrich hastened a divorce action against his (second) wife while she was hospitalized with cancer in order that he might marry the aide. At one point Gingrich’s ailing ex-wife and children had to get material assistance from their local church, having received insufficient sums from Gingrich himself. In 2007, he claimed to have come to grips with his “personal failures,” having sought God’s forgiveness.........