Vito Fossella’s Nightmare
Back when I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, my Congressional representative was a young man with a good future. His name was Vito Fossella, and he was known as a staunch family values conservative. He voted against gay marriage and for posting the Ten Commandments in public places. Fossella and his wife had three children. She was a stay-at-home mom, and they were communicants at St. Clare’s Church on Staten Island. Staten Island is home to many socially conservative Catholics, so Fossella was a perfect fit.
On May 1, 2008, he was arrested for drunk driving, and his life totally unraveled. It turns out he was on the way to visit his second family. 
Fossella had fathered a three-year-old daughter with Laura Fay, a former Air Force colonel The Republican congressman was a regular visitor to Fay’s tidy townhouse – taking strolls around the Alexandria, VA neighborhood with his second family like any other dad in apple-pie America.
Fossella met the mother of his love child during a Congressional junket. She isn’t a stranger to adultery herself–her first husband divorced her for running around; with the second they both had outside affairs.
Now, let’s examine his record on preserving “the sanctity of marriage.”
In 2004, Fossella voted for the Marriage Protection Act, which essentially would have prevented courts from striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. That bill passed the House by a vote of 233-194 and later died in the Senate.
Later in the same month in 2004, , Fossella voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have amended the U.S. Constitution to explicitly ban marriages for same-sex couples in any part of the United States. It would have been the first time that discrimination was to be enshrined in the Constitution. That bill passed the House by a vote of 236-187 and later died in the Senate.
In 2006, Fossella voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment, make it the third time he chose to stand up and firmly deny same-sex couples the thousands of rights and protections that come with a federal and state marriage license.
I find it interesting that Fossella had such strong feelings about an institution that apparently didn’t have much meaning to him in the end.
