Is Mitt Romney Conservative? (Gov Romney Supported Abortion & Gay Agenda with Judges & Boy Scouts)

The Washington, D.C. conservative weekly Human Events last year listed Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in its Top Ten list of RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), ranking him at number 8 in the nation with the following entry:

"Has said, ’I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.’ Supports (homosexual) civil unions and stringent gun laws. After visiting Houston, he criticized the city’s aesthetics, saying, ’This is what happens when you don’t have zoning.’" (Human Events)

Romney should have ranked even higher on the list of RINOs. He famously likes to tell conservative audiences in Iowa and South Carolina that being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.

I attended last fall’s GOP conference in Michigan, where Romney continued his masquerade as a "conservative," even daring to tell the assembled activists: "I am pro-life" -- knowing full well that he does not mean by that term what those listening would think he meant.

Romney’s ten-year political career has occurred from his late 40s to his late 50s, yet he asks pro-family conservatives to naively believe that he’s just now figuring out his core beliefs.

During that decade, he has insistently supported legal abortion-on-demand. In a televised 1994 campaign debate, Romney said: "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time when my Mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice. ...Since that time, my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter, and you will not see my wavering on that." (Boston Globe)

His 2002 gubernatorial campaign web site stated: "As Governor, Mitt Romney would protect the current pro-choice status quo in Massachusetts. No law would change. The choice to have an abortion is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not the government’s." (Archive)

Romney’s response to the National Abortion Rights Action League’s 2002 candidate survery: ’’I respect and will protect a woman’s right to choose. This choice is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government’s. The truth is, no candidate in the governor’s race in either party would deny women abortion rights." (Notably, Romney refused to answer Massachusetts Citizens for Life’s candidate questionnaire.) (Boston Globe)

Not surprisingly, Romney’s clearly stated support for Roe and "a woman’s right to choose" -- i.e., abortion on demand -- earned him the endorsement of the pro-abortion Republican Majority for Choice PAC.

He was also endorsed, twice, by the homosexual "Log Cabin Republicans," the same group that in 2004 spent $1 million attacking President Bush for his support of a Marriage Protection Amendment.

Romney believes the Boy Scouts should allow openly homosexual Scoutmasters: "I feel that all people should be allowed to participate in the Boy Scouts regardless of their sexual orientation." (Web today)

He endorses Ted Kennedy’s federal "gay rights" legislation. He endorses taxpayer-financed same-sex benefits for the homosexual partners of state employees, and even attacked some Democratic legislators for not supporting such government benefits.

According to the Associated Press, he has appointed at least two openly homosexual lawyers to state judgeships, one a board member of the Lesbian & Gay Bar Association. Imagine how that will fly in Republican presidential primaries in the South, the prospect of a president with a record of appointing homosexual activists to the bench. (See copy of gubernatorial news release below.)

In 2002, before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized so-called homosexual "marriage," Romney denounced a preemptive state Marriage Protection Amendment prohibiting homosexual "marriage," civil unions, or same-sex public employee benefits as "too extreme," even after being advised by the media that his own wife and son had just signed a petition to place it on the ballot. (Boston Phoenix)

Now, as he postures to run for president, Romney travels to Iowa and Michigan and South Carolina to claim he’s "pro-life" and brag about fighting homosexual "marriage," saying that at age 59, his position on such issues has "evolved."

(No flip-flop so far, however, on his stated support for homosexual Scoutmasters, forcing taxpayers to fund spousal benefits for the "partners" of state employees involved in homosexual relationships, or Kennedy’s federal "gay rights" legislation.)

Regardless, most pro-family voters don’t believe in the theory of evolution -- including as it applies to politicians, and especially when the alleged "evolution" seems so conveniently timed to produce political benefit.

Gov. Romney can tell all the cattle-rancher-at-a-vegetarian-convention jokes he wants about Massachusetts. But they’re going to fall flat when social conservatives learn -- and they will -- that his long-term record on abortion and elements of homosexual activists’ political agenda has been that of Vegetarian in Chief.

None of my material came from MassResistance.

Log Cabin Republicans are politically and financially alligned with StonewallVets.

Power Point of this brochure can be downloaded here

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HARRY HAYon MAN/BOY LOVE

by David Thorstad

The speeches that Harry Hay made at meetings in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the 1980s and in New York in June 1994 during Stonewall 25, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that launched the modern-day gay liberation movement, are published here for the first time.

Harry, founder in 1950 of the first American gay group to survive, the Mattachine Society, cofounder of the Gay Liberation Front, Southern California chapter, in 1969, cofounder of the Radical Faeries in 1979, father of the U.S. gay movement, and grandfatherly icon of gay liberation, died on October 24, 2002, at the age of ninety. Harry was a vocal and courageous supporter of NAMBLA and intergenerational sexual relationships, though since his death many of the assimilationists in the gay and lesbian movement, including its most prominent organizations, have already sought to erase that part of his radicalism (not to mention his Communist roots and vocal critiques of their own accommodationist approach to the powers that be). In order to bring truth to the record, I have transcribed these comments.

I first met Harry in early 1983, at the time of the first of these speeches. I was introduced to him and his lovely—I almost said saintly—companion, John Burnside, a lovable gay man if ever there was one, by lesbian activist, self-professed witch, and sometime weed partner Katherine Davenport, a mutual friend and journalist for the New York Native. I knew about Harry’s past as a Communist and labor activist, as well as the central role he had played in efforts to launch a gay movement in the dreary, conformist 1950s—a time when homosexuality was still totally medicalized as a sickness or excoriated as a satanic perversion. I also knew that he had developed a philosophy of same-sex love that seemed inspired by the writings of Edward Carpenter, though without the explicit “intermediate sex” or “third sex” baggage, yet retaining a hint of the idea that gay men were destined to lead society to a higher level of sexual freedom and social justice.

When I was president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance in 1975, we received a letter from Harry from Taos, where he was then living, in which he expounded his ideas, with lots of capital letters and, to me, rather strange formulations. I was excited, because I hadn’t realized that he was still alive, since he had remained largely silent so far as gay issues were concerned since he was driven out of Mattachine for his radicalism. So when I met him in 1983, I prepared a lavish turkey dinner for him, John, and Katherine.

From then on, I considered him a friend. I was lucky to have spent more time with him than I could have hoped for, yet far less than I would have liked—at Phil Willkie’s Wisconsin cabin and his St. Paul apartment; at the Stonewall 25 demonstration in New York in 1994, where Harry and John, as well as the late Jim Kepner (another early member of the Mattachine Society and a gay archivist) marched with the Spirit of Stonewall contingent that included NAMBLA; and at the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) conference in New York that same week, which expelled NAMBLA (despite Harry’s vocal protests and subsequent disgust) under pressure from U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, the Clinton administration, gay congressman Barney Frank, and the gay and lesbian assimilationist organizations; at his and John’s apartment in San Francisco; at a Faerie event in Stuyvesant Square Park in New York; at several NAMBLA conferences…

When I learned last September that Harry had inoperable cancer and only weeks to live, I wrote him a card that ended with a thought that expresses an appreciation for his life that I am sure many others would share: “You are leaving the world an unforgettable legacy, and will be an eternal part of our gay Pantheon, along with Ulrichs, Carpenter, and Whitman.”

Of course, Harry stood for much more than the comments published here. But these views were also important to him, as his moving expressions of love for Matt, the man in his life as a boy, make clear. Wherever he is, I thank him for them, and offer them to posterity.

—David Thorstad.

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