By Joe Conason: For honoring his conscience on the issue of marriage equality, President Obama earned angry rebukes from all quarters on the right...In this historic moment for human rights, listening to the likes of Ailes (now on his third marriage) and Limbaugh (currently married to wife No. 4), not to mention Rove (divorced twice), it is impossible to believe that Republicans screaming about the future of wedlock are sincere. If they are truly worried about marriage, they should stop harassing gays and campaign for the only change that might make a real difference.

They could outlaw divorce, or least repeal the ultra-liberal, no-fault divorce laws that they’ve used to their own advantage.

Across America—and particularly in the red states that have rejected gay marriage—divorce rates are continually rising, along with teen pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births and single motherhood (which somehow afflict gay-friendly blue states far less). Gay rights obviously isn’t the cause of marital strife and separation in those places where hostility to same-sex relationships is considered a religious duty. To achieve their professed goal of protecting marriage, shouldn’t the divorce addicts of the Republican right renounce their sins and return to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Old Testament, which forbid divorce except under a few very restricted circumstances?

Of course such a return to bygone moral standards would severely inconvenience men like the hypocrites named above—along with Rupert Murdoch, Newt Gingrich and a very large proportion of the GOP congressional caucus—and will therefore never occur.