Tom Gallagher, the Republican state chief financial officer running for governor on a platform of family values, admitted Monday that he had an extramarital affair that led to his 1979 divorce and said he used marijuana before he was elected to public office ''many, many'' years ago.Hey, I'm all for the idea of "let he who is without sin" and all that; Mr. Gallagher isn't the first guy to have a little something on the side and go through a messy divorce. But it's especially delicious when he happens to be a right-winger running with the blessing of the Religious Reich. And you have to admire the family-values crowd for being so magnanimous in their support of their man:
Gallagher, 62, conducted an impromptu news conference with his wife, Laura, after The Tampa Tribune asked him about 26 pages excerpted from his 27-year-old divorce file, expunged from Miami-Dade court files years ago in a routine purging of dated records.
The revelations come as Gallagher courts religious conservatives, who have embraced him, in part, because he is married and has a 7-year-old son. They see him as more of a committed family man than his GOP primary opponent, Attorney General Charlie Crist, who remains single after a divorce in 1980 following seven months of marriage.
The divorce documents, as well as additional court records obtained by The Miami Herald, show that Gallagher's ex-wife, Ann Louise, kicked him out of their Miami home in 1979 when she discovered he had been having a yearlong affair with a Tallahassee legislative aide.
"The crux of our faith is the cross, is repentance, is redemption," said John Stemberger, a leader in the Florida's Christian conservative movement. "I've been around awhile. I've known people who are what I call phony political conversions, but I've spent a lot of time with Tom and Laura and I think he's genuine."Translation: we're pretty much stuck with him.
I'm waiting for the GOP to say it was a "youthful indiscretion" -- yeah, 35 is the new 18, I guess -- and a man's private life is just that -- private -- and we should respect his rights. All this nattering about privacy from the Right wouldn't sound so hypocritical if they'd have followed their own advice with everybody else's sex life.
Update: Steve Benen (The Carpetbagger Report) has a post up at The Washington Monthly about three Republicans mentioned as front-runners in 2008 who have their own family values issues.
