For this news cycle anyway, Brian Camenker has emerged as a thorn in Mitt Romney’s side. A long time fixture on the fringe of Massachusetts politics, Camenker and his organization, MassResistance, have steadily expressed their disappointment with Mitt Romney as well as virtually every other Massachusetts Republican. One important note – Camenker’s MassResistance verges on being a hate group. Its disappointment with Romney and his Republican predecessors in the Massachusetts’ gubernatorial office is that they haven’t been sufficiently hostile to homosexuals.
None of this is easy for me to write. As strange as it may seem, Brian Camenker and I once were friends. When I ran for State Representative in Massachusetts’s 12th Middlesex district in 1992, Brian was an active Republican ward committee member in the area I sought to represent. We got to know each other reasonably well. I thought he was a nice guy, and I think he felt the same about me. On Election Day in 1992, it poured. In a driving rainstorm, Brain stood next to me that cold morning holding one of my campaign signs for almost two hours.
Any candidate for office knows that a service like that creates a debt that the candidate can’t ever repay. It wasn’t all about me, and I was never so vain as to conclude that the people who volunteered that morning did so because they were my minions or followers. They believed in a cause, and I was the standard bearer for that cause. Nevertheless, the signs they held had my name on them. Almost a decade and a half later, I still feel indebted.
I GOT CREAMED THAT ELECTION DAY, as did virtually every other Republican office seeker in the Commonwealth. I stayed involved with the 12th Middlesex political scene, though, focusing especially on Newton, MA which was my hometown.
The 1993 political year for Newton was dominated by a contentious city-wide argument over the School Committee races. The Newton High Schools were giving out condoms and beginning a more “progressive” form of sex-ed. Both of these things scandalized the town’s conservatives, and they mounted a slate of candidates to run on a “traditional value” platform. The unquestioned leader of the movement, and the angriest Newton conservative, was Brian Camenker.
When it came to School Committee issues, I have always sided with conservatives who believe our schools should focus on educating our children. Other potential agendas, like having the schools serve as a job program for teachers or “socialization” programs, have to take a back seat. I felt that way then, I feel that way now.
I managed the campaign of one of the conservative candidates for School Committee. While I agreed with the policy prescriptions proposed by Brian and his ilk, we got to the same place via very different routes. For Brian Camenker and a handful of others, opposing Newton’s sex-ed program became a moral crusade. Having graduated one of Newton’s high schools a mere eight years earlier, I knew that there was nothing that a sex-ed program would teach students that they hadn’t already learned from magazines, their friends or experience. (In this day of the internet…)
There was also the issue of Brian’s feelings regarding homosexuality. Brian opposed anything that the schools might do that taught tolerance for homosexuals, not on the practical ground that scarce resources for education should be used solely for, you know, education, but rather on a "moral" ground that teaching tolerance for homosexuality was somehow immoral. I found this repugnant, and was not shy about saying so at Ward and City Committee Meetings. Additionally, it was bad politics. One other note - I also thought that Brian’s concerns regarding homosexuality were deepening into an obsession.
In the end, all of the conservative candidates lost. It was no big surprise to anyone, or at least it shouldn’t have been. Newton is one of the most liberal cities in the country. Barney Frank has been the city’s congressman for a generation. A slate of candidates who defined themselves by their anti-homosexual “morality” never had a chance.
At the end of 1993, I moved to Boston and lost touch with the Newton political scene. I have not spoken to Brain Camenker in over 13 years.
BUT I HAVE OCCASSIONALLY SEEN HIM on the news or read about him in the newspaper. My suspicion that Brian had become obsessed with gay issues was subsequently borne out. He has spent his leisure time the past 13 years turning himself into Massachusetts’ most notorious anti-gay scold.
I’m sure Brian would describe his role differently, but I’ll let you be the judge. Seven months ago, Brian and his organization protested a Macy’s window display in Downtown Boston that celebrated Pride Week. Here’s how the Boston Herald summarized Brian’s complaints:
“They were male mannequins with enlarged breasts, and one was wearing a skirt,” said MassResistance president Brian Camenker, referring to the gay pride flag wrapped around one figure, cinched with a white belt. “It was really disgusting.”
My point isn’t that the display was appropriate or inappropriate, although those who found it inappropriate could surely shop elsewhere to register their disapproval. (Readers who for whatever reason are desperate to make up their own minds regarding the display can follow the link and see a picture of it.) My point is that Brian Camenker has spent the last thirteen years of his life doing things like getting outraged over store mannequins that he found “disgusting.” The man I knew 14 years ago was a good man, a dedicated father and a nice guy. He was normal. His current incarnation is, more than anything else, sad.
But Brian is what he is, and the media has discovered him. Previously, Brian had danced around the margins of fame, doing things like making a fool of himself by appearing on the Daily Show blasting the "gay agenda." Mitt Romney’s campaign, however, has catapulted Brian to new heights. A national media desperate to find the dirt under Romney’s fingernails has found Brian, a longtime antagonist of the Governor’s.
Responding to popular demand, Brian and his group today issued a 28 page report belittling Romney’s bona fides as a social conservative. Not everything in it is wrong. Indeed, most of it is factually correct. But the fact that Camenker is so infuriated by the charges he lists should disqualify him from a seat at the Grownups’ Table of civilized political discourse.
Here are some of the headings in Camenker’s report that purport to show Romney’s past outrages:
Gov. Romney has a long history of promoting and furthering the homosexual agenda, and working closely with leading gay activists.
Romney twice sought and received the endorsement of the homosexual Log Cabin Republican Club.
Romney's campaign distributed pro-gay rights campaign literature during Boston's "Gay Pride" events
Romney supports homosexual "anti-discrimination" laws.
Romney appointed prominent homosexuals to key positions in his administration.
Is this homophobia? I link you decide.
As for liberals in the media and the blogosphere who think legitimizing Brian Camenker will be a swell way to take Mitt Romney down a peg, they might want to rethink that. People like Andrew Sullivan (who in the past has approvingly cited Camenker as an anti-Romney authority) should strongly consider the wisdom of offering Brian that kind of legitimacy.
Regarding media outlets like AP who have printed a news story on Mitt Romney’s critic and the 28 page report he just released excoriating the former Governor, one can only wonder whether they’ve read the report and are aware of the raw, undiluted hatred that it contains.
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He at least, doesn’t ignore a problem, thereby enabling the left to take our country even further into the sewer.