By Cliff Dunn

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s gay half-sister has weighed in on the future of her brother’s presidential campaign.

Candace Gingrich-Jones defended her half-brother over calls for him to abandon his bid for the 2012 Republican nomination, and said recent setbacks won’t deter his White House run.

“He doesn’t give up that easily,” Gingrich-Jones told The Huffington Post. “Just because some staff members weren’t with his strategy isn’t going to make him quit. If anything, I can imagine that strengthening his desire and his resolve to do good.”
Gingrich-Jones’ comments came in the wake of a mass exodus of Gingrich staffers two weeks ago. A majority of his campaign staff, including his campaign manager and a half dozen senior advisors, resigned after Gingrich left for a two-week vacation cruise; many close to the campaign were concerned about the message it sent.

The list of resignations included Gingrich’s campaign manager, Rob Johnson, longtime spokesman Rick Tyler, and strategists based in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Iowa.

Gingrich-Jones, who works with the Human Rights Campaign’s Youth and Campus Outreach Program, credits Gingrich’s third wife, Callista, with a change in her brother’s positions on gay rights.

“She’s possibly gotten LGBT issues to no longer be a red meat issue for him politically.”

Possibly. But in 2010, the former House Speaker was a major contributor to the campaign that successfully unseated three of the nine state Supreme Court justices who had ruled in favor of marriage equality in Iowa. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress, of $850,000 raised in that campaign, one third was donated by Newt Gingrich and his associates.
The former Georgia congressman is also on record as opposing gay marriage, including apparently for members of his own family. In a 1996 Meet the Press segment, Gingrich told interviewer Tim Russert that if his sister married in a same-sex union, he would not attend. In August 2009, Candace married longtime partner Rebecca Jones; her half-brother did not attend the Boston ceremony.