In Repair

Most people know that Cindy McCain is John’s second wife, but the details surrounding his first marriage have been glaringly absent from the Republican nominee’s bio.

Cindy McCain

Carol McCain waited patiently in the U.S. while McCain was imprisoned for five years in Vietnam, raising their three children and suffering a car accident that left her terribly disfigured. After suffering through 23 surgeries that left her unable to walk, Carol began gaining weight.

Doctors wanted to get word of Carol’s injuries to her imprisoned husband, but she resisted because she thought he had enough problems already. When John was released and returned home, friends say he was appalled by her weight gain. Although their marriage would last another six years, he began persuing Cindy six months before they divorced and married her only one month later.

Dave Lindorff of CommonDreams.org offers the following:

Oddly missing from this warm, feel-good picture, however, was a single mention of McCain’s first wife Carol Shepp-the one who stood by him, raising their three kids, through his trying five years in a Vietnamese prison, only to be dumped upon his heroic return for a younger woman, despite, or because of, her having suffered permanent disabling and disfiguring injuries in an auto accident during his absence.

Now I’m not faulting McCain for leaving his wife for a younger, richer woman. Who knows what the relationship was like at the time. Maybe Shepp wanted him out of her life by the time he started slipping off to date beer heiress Cindy Lou Hensley. But if McCain and his campaign staff wanted to make him a poster child for “family values,” they should have had the basic integrity to explain that he didn’t always consider marriage a binding covenant, for better or worse, richer or poorer, and in sickness or in health. (If you want an unvarnished view of the real John McCain, read an interview with Carol McCain published last June in the UK newspaper, The Mail, headlined The Wife US Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind.)

McCain’s party, and his fundamentalist Christian backers, are always attacking efforts by gay Americans to win the right to marry by saying that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, but clearly, with over half of all those marriages between a man and a woman ending in divorce, it’s not all that sacred, and McCain is living testament to that hypocrisy.
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So much for family values.

(Special thanks to Karen for sending me a link to this story.)