God bless inept right-wingers.

I’d be more wor­ried if they were smart (like Nixon was). Newt thinks he’s smart and has a few media’oids con­vinced, He really just good at slap­ping other peo­ple with wet tow­els. He’s sud­denly an expert on what he calls “tra­di­tional mar­riage.” Maybe he’s an expert: he’s been in enough of them.

At one debate between Repub­li­can can­di­dates, he said the gov­ern­ment has the duty to pro­tect the Sacra­ment of Mar­riage. He used the term Sacra­ment twice, to show how much he was in sup­port of this aspect of mar­riage. Once could have been a mis­take. Twice is a pattern.

The gov­ern­ment has no busi­ness sup­port­ing or pre­vent­ing any kind of Sacra­ment. That’s a church term, and tra­di­tional litur­gi­cal Chris­t­ian churches have sev­eral: Eucharist, Abso­lu­tion, Holy Orders, Unc­tion, Bap­tism, Con­fir­ma­tion and Matrimony.

The minute the gov­ern­ment gets into the Sacra­ment busi­ness — as Newt wants — it is vio­lat­ing the US Con­sti­tu­tion. The gov­ern­ment sup­port­ing one church’s sacra­ments over another is ille­gal in the United States, but that’s what this self-styled his­to­rian wants to do.

The Con­sti­tu­tion was writ­ten to pro­tect Deist cit­i­zens — like Thomas Jef­fer­son — from Cru­saders like Newt Gin­grich. He con­sid­ers him­self to be as much an expert on reli­gion as he is on mar­riage. In his defense, he has the same creds on that sub­ject. He’s had as many church mem­ber­ships as he has mar­riages. He was born into a Lutheran fam­ily but con­verted to South­ern Bap­tist at some later point. He’s cur­rently a mem­ber of the Roman Catholic church.

All those mar­riages must have made join­ing the Romans an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion. Does the Roman church just dis­al­low divorce if you don’t have… on, who the hell knows (or cares)–.

I wish Newt the best of luck in the pri­mary. It will make the POTUS sea­son really fun to watch.