GOP Traditional marriage: one man, one woman at a time, kinda sorta

Iowa's state court temporarily allowed marriage by all - though only one gay couple managed to get married before the court decided to postpone in anticipation of an appeal.

Predictably, the GOP candidates are bewailing the fact. John McCain, for instance, is quick to say that he supports "the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman." But McCain dumped his first wife for a rich 25-year-old - and he cheated before he dumped her. Good old Fred Thompson is also married a second time, to a woman younger than his daughter. Rudy Giuliani's serial relationships are notorious - including the way he dumped his second wife in a press conference and flaunted his then-mistress current wife in public. And the GOP's darling of the beginning of this "new age" of one-party rule, Newt Gingrich, dumped his wife for a younger woman while she was in the hospital with cancer, and has since cheated on his current wife - all very publically.

And yet, these are the people who would deny the right to marriage to others.

ps - Glenn Greenwald has this to add:

One last point. The conventional wisdom has already arisen that this "activist" judicial ruling in Iowa is going to catapult same-sex marriages to the top of the political agenda, galvanizing the potent Values Voters base. Last October -- weeks before the midterm election -- a New Jersey state court issued a similar ruling about marriage laws (albeit mandating civil unions), and we were told by the standard cliche-spewers that this posed a real election danger for Democrats because of the backlash it would produce.

Two weeks later, New Jersey elected a new Democratic Senator by a wide margin in what was predicted to be a close race and easily re-elected every Democratic House incumbent; no incumbent Democratic Senator, Representative or Governor was defeated anywhere in the entire nation, and Democrats took over control of both houses of Congress, multiple state houses and several governorships. How wrong does a political cliche have to become before our pundit class stops repeating it?