Brood of Maggots

“Marianne Gingrich said she was surprised at the timing. “How could he ask me for a divorce on Monday and within 48 hours give a speech on family values and talk about how people treat people?” she said.”

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. [14] [b]
15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. ”

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in 1999 asked his second wife for an “open marriage” or a divorce at the same time he was giving speeches around the country on family and religious values, his former wife, Marianne, said Thursday.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Marianne Gingrich said her former husband called her on May 10, 1999, as she was having dinner with her 84-year-old mother and said, “I want a divorce.”

ABC News is planning to air an interview with the ex-wife of Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Thursday Night. The interview comes two days before the South Carolina primary. (Jan. 19)
Video

“Is there anybody else?” Marianne Gingrich recalled saying. “He was quiet. Within two seconds, when he didn’t immediately answer, I knew.”
Two days later, Newt Gingrich gave a speech at a conference titled “The Demise of American Culture” sponsored by the Republican Women Leaders Forum in Erie, Pa. Gingrich extolled the virtues of the Founding Fathers and criticized liberal politicians for supporting tax increases, which he said hurt families and children. In the speech, which was televised on C-SPAN, he spoke often of God, families and values.
“When a liberal talks about values, will he or she actually like us to teach American history?” Gingrich told the women’s group. “Will they actually like young people to learn that George Washington was an ethical man? A man of standards, a man who earned the right to be father of this country?”
Marianne Gingrich said she was surprised at the timing. “How could he ask me for a divorce on Monday and within 48 hours give a speech on family values and talk about how people treat people?” she said.
At the Republican presidential debate Thursday night, Gingrich responded directly to his ex-wife’s allegations for the first time, issuing a blanket denial. “The story is false,” he said.
After Gingrich’s comments at the debate, Marianne Gingrich declined to direcly respond to the denial, other than to say she was sticking by her story, which she said is “the truth.”
Earlier in the day at a campaign event in South Carolina, the former speaker of the House had called the interviews with his former wife “tawdry and inappropriate” and refused to answer questions about them. “I’m not going to say anything about Marianne,” he said with his third wife, Callista, standing a few paces behind him.
Gingrich has said on several occasions that he has made mistakes in his life and has asked God for forgiveness.
Marianne Gingrich, 60, has been publicly critical of her former husband in the past, but her most recent accounts are more explicit about the demise of their marriage.
She said she was speaking out because she wanted her story told from her point of view rather than to be depicted as a victim or suffer a whisper campaign by supporters of her former husband’s presidential bid.
She said she had received so many requests for interviews that “it was unavoidable” and“I knew I wouldn’t get through this year without” doing an interview.
In the four weeks after Gingrich asked for a divorce, the couple saw a counselor, and he seemed to vacillate, Marianne Gingrich said. She had learned the name of his paramour, Callista Bisek — now his wife — although Newt Gingrich never talked about her by name. Callista had worked in the House for a GOP representative from Wisconsin, her home state, and then as clerk of the House Agriculture Committee.
After one counseling session, Newt Gingrich asked Marianne for an “open marriage” — though not in exactly those words — so that he could see other women, she said.
Marianne, who had attended services in a Baptist church with her husband, refused.
“He said the problem with me was I wanted him all to myself,” she said. “I said, ‘That’s what marriage is.’ He said [of Callista], ‘She doesn’t care what I do.’ ”
Marianne said, “He was asking me for an open marriage, and I wouldn’t do it.”
Later, Marianne said, her husband told her, “In a few years I’m going to run for president. She’s going to help me become president.”
The divorce was “ugly,” she said, and the stress exacerbated her multiple sclerosis.
Marianne Gingrich also spoke about her marriage to ABC News’s “Nightline” in an interview aired Thursday. Newt Gingrich’s daughters from his first marriage wrote a letter Wednesday to the network asking that the broadcast be killed.
For more than a decade, daughter Kathy Lubbers served as president and chief executive of Gingrich Communications, which promoted her father’s speeches and activities. It was disbanded last year when he decided to run for president.
Her sister, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, has earned more than $56,000 working for her father’s campaign committees in the past two years, records show.
Marianne Gingrich, who was a full-time political wife when married to Gingrich, said many of her views of her former husband and his political positions are positive. She believes that she and Gingrich, whom she married in 1981, accomplished a lot together when he was in Congress.
She said Gingrich has not spoken to her since the divorce.
Staff writer Nia-Malika Henderson and staff researchers Alice Crites and Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

I don’t know why there are no Democratic women who feel confident enough to run for president. But I’m proud that it is Republicans that produced the first serious nationwide woman candidate for president. Maybe the Democratic women are too intimidated by the White House style of leadership? Maybe the Democratic women are too shy? Maybe they are too busy waiting for Hillary to make up her mind? But I am proud that Elizabeth Dole is making a serious campaign and in a serious way. And frankly, I would so much prefer her to either Gore or Bradley that I am proud she is out there campaigning across this country.

We have had a 35-year experiment in a unionized, bureaucratic, credentialed, secular assault on the core values of this country. We should not be surprised that eventually they yield bad fruit because they are bad seeds. They now make sense as a society. For 35 years, god has been driven out of the classroom and we have seen the result in a secular atheistic system in which god in not allowed to exist.

And let us say to Hollywood, and let us say to the Nintendos and the other games, if you are going to be sick, we are going to find a way to protect this country from you. And whether that means exposing movies to liability litigation, whether that means exposing computerized games to litigation, whether it means challenging the Democrats to cut off the fund raising in a verse. Don’t tell us you care about children and have the people who are corrupting their lives raise your money while you tell us you care about traditional values.

Let me set some simple standards. When Al Gore talks about god and faith, is he for voluntary school prayer or isn’t he? Does he want to bring god back in or does he want to give a psychobabble? Yes or no! Don’t tell where you are sort of for it and Littleton is certainly a tragedy and I certainly feel we’ve had 8 years of that, let’s be serious. This was a mistake to take god out to the classrooms. It was a mistake to take the right to pray out of the classroom. Now are you for changing the mistake or not changing the mistake? But don’t tell us that you are really worried about the consequences, but you don’t want to change the cause. When politician talk about family, is Bill Bradley for tax cuts so that families have more times with their children, or is he against tax cuts. Does he wants to abolish the death tax so we strengthen family bonds or is he for the death tax even though it clearly makes no sense as a society to punish grandparents and parents for saving for their children and grandchildren. It is the socially dumbest tax we have.
When a liberal talks about values, will he or she actually like us to teach American History? Will they actually like young people to learn that George Washington was an ethical man? A man of standard, a man who earned the right to be father of this country. Would they actually like us to learn that Lincoln agonized, or are discussing those kind of moral values culturally inappropriate because we have to be a multi-cultural society where you get to pick and event your own culture? Something which historically no civilization has ever successfully done, because it means you have thirteen- to fifteen-year olds in total confusion. They are being asked to invent a reasonable civilization.

And when you focus on Iraq and the President did for a little while in 1997. And I was with him because I though he was doing the right thing. And then he forgot it. Saddam is still there but none of the stated goals remember all the worries, the sack of sugar, the danger of biological weapons. They didn’t go away. It is just that this administration’s attention span is relativity short.