The big dilemma the so-called "Christian" Right is going to have to pretend does not exist ...

Newt with 2nd mistress turned 3rd wife, Calista,
enjoying the sanctity of marriage until
a better model comes along.

It is no secret - Newt Gingrich is a nasty, adulterous, hypocritical liar and fraud. His track record in politics is very public and very ugly, and I would argue the antithesis of every value the Republican party "claims" to hold near and dear. So it is no surprise that Newt has enemies, many of them from his own party, many of them who served with him when he was Speaker of the House, providing them with a bird's-eye view of just how rotten to the core ole Newt is. And yet, astonishingly, Newt is the current front-runner for the 2012 Republican candidate for President of the United States. And this has prompted some within his party to speak out about the creepiest huckster in American politics:

Conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma bluntly stated his concern about the twice-divorced, thrice-married Gingrich during a Friday town hall.

"He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States,” Coburn said, per the Tulsa World. “His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president."

Coburn said that Gingrich’s personal history indicates that he “doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage.”

But far more interesting than the Republicans willing to break Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment and speak ill of a fellow Republican is the huge dilemma that a possible President Newt would present to those within the Republican party who supposedly place "Family Values", "Christian Values", and the "Sanctity of Marriage" above all else. How can this group of "Christians", who proclaim their commitment to these values every damn chance they can, vote for a man who is the friggin poster boy for everything they proclaim to detest?

Well ...

It appears that many of them detest Barack Obama more:

There’s an e-mail war raging among some of the nation’s leading evangelicals over whether Newt Gingrich has repented enough for his sins to be president.

One recent skirmish was set off by an open letter urging Gingrich to give a major speech confronting his perceived moral stumbles, including an affair with his third wife, Callista, while married to No. 2.

“You need to make it as clear as you possibly can that you deeply regret your past actions and that you do understand the anguish and suffering they caused others, including your former spouses,” Richard Land, public policy chief for the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote.

[...]

Rather than galvanizing the faithful, however, Land’s letter provoked an outcry from a handful of evangelical leaders who argued Gingrich has repented enough and deserves forgiveness.

[...]

On the same e-mail chain, which CNN obtained from a conservative activist, prominent Atlanta preacher Richard Lee said the nation’s evangelicals needed to support Gingrich.

Lee called Gingrich “the only forceful Christian candidate who can at this point be elected and cleanse the White House next November.”

Got that?

Andrew Sullivan sure did:

Don't you love that word "cleanse"? The current president is a devoted family man, devoid of any personal scandal, and a committed Christian, as his speeches and books testify to. And this must be "cleansed"? The reason is that Obama represents a more liberal and live-and-let-live version of Christianity, and believes in the separation of church and state. That's what needs to be cleansed (assuming we are not talking bald-faced racism here).

What Newt represents is the tip of the spear of the Christianist attempt to wipe separation of church and state out of the constitution. And in this struggle, the denominational differences do not count as much as the secular enemy. Gingrich is also not an old-style Catholic - in the Kennedy or Cuomo or Biden manner. He is an ideological Benedict XVI Catholic, bent on public and political Christianity as a means of saving what's left of civilization after the great Electro-Magnetic Pulse.

But wait! I am not done with the breathtaking hypocrisy of the Religious Right just yet. There are rumors that NOM (National Organization For Marriage), an organization whose very raison d'être is to "protect" marriage, might endorse old Newtie the adulterer for President of this God-fearin "Christian" nation. Now how's that for a cherry on top of a big pile of dung? 

NOM has got to be one of the nastiest, most hateful and homophobic organizations out there. They spend millions of dollars, much of it secretly funneled from the Mormon and Catholic Churches, to supposedly protect the "sanctity" of marriage, which when translated from their lingo to reality simply means: keep those evil homos from ever having the right to marry the person they love. And yet, there's this pervasive rumor out there that they might support a candidate who is a serial adulterer,  and on his third marriage? Now that would give us a crystal clear view of what their mission is really all about - wouldn't it?