Yesterday I posted a link to an ad produced by the Lincoln Project that showed two women friends secretly voting for Kamala Harris while their husbands feel confident that they will follow their guidance and vote for creepy Donald Trump. Here’s the ad again.

Only you need to know who you vote for. Just ask Melania. pic.twitter.com/gdMyXZXYjj

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 28, 2024

Here’s another one produced by Vote Common Good that is narrated by Julia Roberts.

The ads are well produced and mildly amusing and make the somewhat banal point that nobody will know whom you vote for so you should vote for whomever you want. But these ads seem to have driven the right wing bananas.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is raging about an ad telling women they don’t have to reveal to anyone, including their husbands, how they vote in the 2024 election.
…

The ad, produced by the group Vote Common Good, has thrown conservatives into a frenzy. Gingrich joined the chorus in a Thursday interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, who complained about celebrities endorsing Harris en masse.

“These people are dishonest,” Gingrich responded. “And so, for them to tell people to lie is just one further example of the depth of their corruption. I mean, how do you run a country where you’re walking around saying, ‘Wives should lie to their husbands, husbands should lie to their wives’?”
…

“I mean, what kind of a totally amoral, corrupt, sick system have the Democrats developed? If you think about it at that level, it is astonishing, the decay,” he said, before claiming that the “decay” is why Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who reportedly maintained at least three romantic liaisons outside of his marriage with Cheryl Hines, left the Democratic Party and endorsed former President Donald Trump.
…

“Instead of having a dignity and patriotism and a sense of morality, these are really sick people,” Gingrich continued. “And the more you watch them, to say, ‘Oh, why don’t you lie to your husband?’ as a publicly advocated ad? That is sick! And I think we ought to have the courage to say this is a sick, dishonest party.”

Let’s pause for a moment. There is indeed something very disturbing about these ads but it is not what seems to infuriate Gingrich, that women are lying to their husbands about their choice for president. It is that the women feel the need to lie to their husbands about whom they voted for. What kind of controlling relationships have these men created in their marriages that their wives cannot think for themselves and vote freely? That is the real problem.

And then there is of course the obvious point that Gingrich is hardly in a position to throw stones at these women because in 2007 “Gingrich told [Christian televangelist] James Dobson in a radio interview that he had in the 1990s cheated on his second wife (with his current wife, Callista)”. He also had an affair with his second wife while married to his first. And of course creepy Trump, the person whom Gingrich worships, is a serial philanderer who lies like he breathes and has lied to all his wives about his affairs with other women.

But that perfectly captures the GOP attitude about women. It is perfectly acceptable for men to lie to their wives about major things and even have affairs but let women hide from their husbands small things like whom they are going to vote for and they get lectured about how that constitutes an act of great moral turpitude and is a sign of an “amoral, corrupt, sick system” created by Democrats.

And they wonder wby they are losing support among women.