Marriage: One Man, a Handful of Women

Marriage, we have been told time and time and time again during this Republican presidential primary campaign, is between one man and one woman.

Ron Paul, who is coming up on his 55th wedding anniversary: “I think that marriages should be between a single man and a single woman.”

Mitt Romney, who still calls his wife of 42 years “my bride”: “To say that marriage is something other than the relationship between … a man and a woman, I think, is a mistake.”

Rick Santorum, married since 1990, has had a harder go of it.

Facing a hostile questioner at a meeting of college Republicans in New Hampshire, Santorum started down the “Where does it end?” rabbit hole: “So anyone can marry anyone else?” “So anybody can marry several people?” “What about three men?”

This was familiar intellectual territory for Santorum, who gave an Associated Press reporter this history lesson in 2003: “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

But marriage isn’t one thing. We’ve been made painfully aware of that by the fourth man still standing in the GOP contest.

Newt Gingrich has signed not one but two anti-gay marriage pledges. A President Gingrich, should such a thing ever come to pass, would defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court and back a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage.

Gingrich’s definition of marriage for the rest of us is the one that gets him huzzahs from the conservative faithful and wins South Carolina primaries: One man and one woman.

His definition of marriage for himself has been something altogether different.

Early on, it was defined as one teenager and his high school math teacher.

Gingrich fell in love with Jackie Battley when he was 16 and she was teaching him geometry. When they married in 1962, he was 19 and she was 26.

Seventeen years later, as they were raising two daughters, Gingrich’s definition of marriage (for himself, mind you) expanded to one man, one 43-year-old wife with uterine cancer and one 28-year-old mistress.

Gingrich met Marianne Gintner when he was a married congressman in 1979, and he asked her to marry him three weeks into their relationship. Their affair continued until he was divorced from Battley in 1981.

Later, Gingrich changed his definition of marriage for himself ever so slightly: One man, one wife with multiple sclerosis and one mistress 23 years his junior.

Gingrich began a six-year extramarital affair with Callista Bisek in 1993, when he was a congressman and she was a congressional aide.

Marianne Gingrich, the second former Mrs. Gingrich, gave a television interview just before the South Carolina primary in which she alleged her husband liked the idea of having a wife and a mistress simultaneously and asked her shortly after she had been diagnosed with MS to condone an open marriage. She didn’t, and they divorced.

Today, Gingrich’s personal definition of marriage is one twice-divorced man and one former mistress named Callista. They married in 2000, he buys her a lot of jewelry, and they seem quite happy. Gingrich denies he sought permission for an open marriage.

The betting among the out-of-touch, liberal punditry was that Gingrich’s caddish treatment of his former wives and the open-marriage allegation would sink him in the evangelical Christian South.

But Gingrich triumphed in South Carolina, and his support was especially strong among voters who described themselves as conservative and among those who said they made their minds up at the last minute. He also won the female vote.

The open-marriage interview didn’t hurt Gingrich a bit; it probably gave him a boost among those who feel for a guy whose crowded marriage score sheet now includes one very vocal, critical ex-wife.

With Santorum the winner in Iowa by a squeaker, Romney the clear victor in New Hampshire and Gingrich winning by a large margin in South Carolina, this contest is still a toss-up. And there’s no telling whether the do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do candidate will wear thin or whether Gingrich will tap into an electorate open to heterosexual open marriage just as long as they keep the institution closed to gays.

Gingrich probably also got a big boost in South Carolina when he called being questioned by CNN’s John King about his ex-wife’s open marriage allegation “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”

Anything he can imagine? Imagine that.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie Linthicum at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal