An ad attacking Newt Gingrich for his
marital infidelity was launched by a conservative Christian group on
Friday.
The ad arrives just as Gingrich has
begun sounding optimistic about his chances of becoming the GOP
nominee for president.
“I'm going to be the nominee,”
Gingrich told ABC News this week. “I mean, it's very hard to look
at the recent polls and think that … the odds are very high I'm
going to be the nominee.”
The 3-minute ad, produced by the
anonymous group Iowans
for Christian Leaders in Government, begins with video of
Gingrich saying he's a strong proponent of family earlier this month
at a Republican debate.
“If you go back to your district and
you find people who have been here 25 years and have two generations
of family and have been paying taxes and are in a local church, as
somebody who believes strongly in family, you're going to have a hard
time explaining why that particular subset is being broken up and
forced to leave,” Gingrich said in answering a question on illegal
immigration.
The ad goes on to question the veracity
of Gingrich's statement by pointing out that the former speaker has
been divorced twice, married three times, and was involved in an
extramarital affair at the same time he was leading the charge
against President Bill Clinton for having an affair with Monica
Lewinsky.
Richard Land of the Southern Baptist
Convention is quoted as saying, “Was there hypocrisy involved? Of
course there was. And it needs to be called for what it is.
Hypocrisy.” (The video is embedded in the right panel of this
page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
Not addressed in the ad is Gingrich's
support for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 law that
bars federal agencies and the military from recognizing the legal
marriages of gay and lesbian couples, which was approved during his
tenure as speaker of the House.
Recently, Gingrich called
marriage equality “a temporary aberration that will dissipate.”