Op-ed: Why Newt Gingrich Really Does Live Like a Porn Star 

Truth Wins Out placed an admittedly provocative full-page ad
in today’s edition of Roll Call, a
Capitol Hill newspaper, headlined “Newt Gingrich: Talks Like a Preacher, Lives
Like a Porn Star.” In it, we admonish Gingrich for his stunning hypocrisy on
the issue of marriage equality, taking him to task for the way that he, a
serial adulterer with multiple marriages, works tirelessly to prevent same-sex
couples from marrying because of a professed belief that marriage is “sacred.”

This ad was strategically timed to coincide with the start
of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC. The
annual conference, which began today and culminates on Saturday with a
closely-watched straw poll, is the nation’s largest gathering of conservatives
and has become a place of pilgrimage for right-wing celebrities, bloggers,
pundits, elected officials, and presidential candidates. The speaker’s list for
this year’s conference reads like the roster of a conservative Dream Team: Rick
Perry, Scott Walker, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Tony
Perkins, Ann Coulter, Herman Cain, John Boehner, and GOP presidential wannabes
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich.

It also comes in the midst of a white-hot week for the
freedom to marry movement — a week in which the House and Senate in Washington
state passed a marriage equality bill, a similar bill was introduced in the
Illinois Assembly, and California’s Proposition 8 was ruled unconstitutional in
a federal appellate court. And it’s only Thursday!

While TWO’s ad is already receiving a lot of attention from LGBT
media, our organization is also hearing from critics who wonder why we decided
to focus on Gingrich at all, since his presidential campaign has deflated so
rapidly in recent weeks. “He’s yesterday’s news,” one activist wrote. “Slamming
Newt is pointless — he doesn’t have a chance of becoming the nominee.”

Those who make these arguments miss the point entirely.
Truth Wins Out is not trying to
influence the outcome of the presidential election. We’re leaving that to
organizations like the Stonewall Democrats, the Log Cabin Republicans, and the
Human Rights Campaign. (Besides, one newspaper ad can’t even compete in the
brave new political world of Super PACs.) TWO launched the ad because we
believe that when the LGBT community is attacked, we should fight back. It
doesn’t matter what political party, if any, a person belongs to – we sharply criticized
then-Senator Barack Obama when his campaign invited the outspokenly homophobic
and self-proclamed “ex-gay” singer Donnie McClurkin to join him on the trail in
South Carolina, to name just one example. Regardless of a person’s politics, if
they attack or degrade LGBT people, we must respond.

And Gingrich has certainly attacked. He recently demeaned
married same-sex couples in lifelong committed relationships as nothing more
than “friends.” He has repeatedly pledged
to advance a constitutional amendment excluding same-sex couples from marriage.
He funneled
$200,000 into the successful effort to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices
whose ruling allowed LGBT couples the freedom to marry. And he wasted no time lambasting
Tuesday’s historic Proposition 8 ruling as an unconscionable judicial assault
on the “Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States.”

Newt and his comrades in the antigay lobby used to say that
marriage equality harms children and families. Repeated studies showing that same-sex
couples have equal (or even better)
odds of raising happy, well-adjusted, successful children, coupled with an
explosion in visibility for LGBT couples nationwide, have obliterated that
argument completely. So now they’ve shifted strategies, focusing on religion-
and morality-based opposition. We seem to be hearing the same platitudes
everywhere lately: marriage equality comes at the expense of religious liberty.
Allowing same-sex couples to marry is immoral.

Conservatives, including Gingrich, proclaim marriage to be a
holy sacrament and position themselves as the valiant defenders of this
tradition.  Even that doesn’t go
far enough for the former Speaker, who would have you believe his moral beacon
shines so brightly as to render him the “definer
of civilization.” But as we all know, Newt’s personal life proves the
hollowness of these words. He has behaved reprehensibly in at least two of his
three marriages, yet tells anyone who will listen that LGBT Americans should be
forbidden from marrying at all. And the social
conservatives at the base of his party are eating it up.

Pointing out Newt Gingrich’s serial
hypocrisy undermines our opponents’ core argument about marriage being too
sacred for same-sex couples. Doing so at CPAC implicates social conservatives
for aiding and abetting behavior they purport to oppose when they slavishly
support Gingrich. (After all, if they can support someone like Gingrich, what
does it even mean to be a social conservative today?) It exposes their “pro-family”
gimmick and reveals that they’re not pro-family at all,
just anti-gay. And it provides a critical opportunity to undermine the
incoherent, yet potent arguments used by the right to justify their opposition
to marriage equality and devaluation of LGBT people and families. That’s why
Truth Wins Out ran our hard-hitting ad, and that’s why it’s important to go
after Newt Gingrich, at this time, on this issue.

JOHN BECKER is the communications and development
director for Truth Wins Out.