Politics of Marriage

Personal lives of politicians should be off limits in most cases, but Conservatives has made morality a political issue in which they are superior to dirty hippies Liberals.

Perhaps it is a coincidence - some may call it karma - but two of the three presidential front-runners in the self-described ‘party of personal responsibility’ have, to put it mildly, sloppy private life stories.

Republicans have long chastised Democrats as the party of loose morals yet while Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-New York) try to court the support of social conservatives, both have at least one failed marriage and bouts of infidelity. Rumored presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a lot of both.

McCain married his second wife a month after his previous marriage, which included an affair, was dissolved.

Giuliani was married to his second cousin for fourteen years - illegal in dozens of countries and forever dubbed ‘the weirdness factor’. He had an adulterous affair while married to his second wife and publicly announced his intention to separate from her before he informed her. (However, it is not even close to former House Speaker Gingrich, who served his first wife and former high school math teacher, with divorce papers while she was in the hospital for cancer. It takes a certain kind of assholeness to do that.) Giuliani is currently working on a third marriage and appears to have forgotten about his past.

If part of your political ideology is to claim moral superiority over your opponents, then your leaders should at least live up to your own high standards.