Adultery, Dishonesty & Corruption Aren’t “Baggage”
In this age of euphemisms, it’s rare to hear a spade called a spade any more. No one is blind any more, they’re “visually impaired.” We don’t put criminals in jail any longer; we house “career offenders.” And we don’t bomb the crap out of countries that cross us, we engage in “kinetic military actions.” So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who follows GOP politics that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is often referred to as “having a lot of baggage.”
Let’s clarify something up front. Adultery, dishonesty, and corruption aren’t “baggage.” They are the outward signs of an inner lack of integrity and character. They are the symptoms of an unprincipled and dishonorable life. They are like the oft-overlooked tiny wormhole on the shiny red apple that leads to a rotten inner core. When we ignore the symptomatic signposts that warn us of serious character flaws, we end up with bad politicians who do bad things to our country, our system of government, and ultimately, to us.
Newt Gingrich is the only Speaker of the House in history to have been disciplined for ethics violations. Eighty-four ethics charges were brought against him. In order to avoid a full hearing, Gingrich negotiated a settlement in which eighty-three of the charges were dropped, and he was sanctioned for the remaining charge by a House vote of 395 to 28 and fined $300,000 on January 21, 1997. And letÂ’s not forget that this was while the Republicans had a majority in the House!
At age 16, Newt Gingrich slept with his high school math teacher, Jackie Battley, whom he eventually married in 1962 when he was 19, and she was 26. Perhaps this sort of thing was accepted with a wink and a nod in the early 1960′s, but today, we call such behavior “statutory rape” and “inappropriate teacher-student relationships.” There are plenty of female high school teachers languishing in prisons today for exactly the same behavior.
Consider this narrative, which appeared in a 1995 Vanity Faire article about Gingrich:
In the spring of 1977, [Anne Manning, who admitted to a relationship with Gingrich that started during his 1976 campaign] was in Washington to attend a census-bureaus workshop when Gingrich took her to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. He met her back at her modest hotel room. “We had oral sex,” she says. “He prefers that… because then he can say, “I never slept with her.” Indeed, before Gingrich left that evening, she says, he threatened her: “If you ever tell anybody about this, I’ll say you’re lying.”
During that same period, one of Newt GingrichÂ’s neighbors told the following story about him:
Kip Carter, who lived a few doors down from the couple, saw more than he wanted to. “We had been out working a football game —I think it was the Bowdon game— and we would split up. It was a Friday night. I had Newt’s daughters, Jackie Sue and Kathy, with me. We were all supposed to meet back at this professor’s house. It was a milk-and-cookies kind of shakedown thing, buck up the troops. I was cutting across the yard to go up the driveway. There was a car there. As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys’ wives with her head in his lap going up and down. Newt kind of turned and gave me his little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then.