Romney's opposition to marriage equality

Nathaniel Frank, PhD, author of Unfriendly  Fire:   How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, writes on his blog about Obama's 'coming out' for marriage equality and about Mitt Romney's contrasting backwardness:

Even if you suspect that Obama's pro-gay announcement this week is an effort to distract voters from the struggling economy, something critical has changed: LGBT issues are now being used as a wedge in our favor, not against us. Finally! . . .

 

Romney reacted to Obama's evolution by digging in his heels.  He said that states are free to bar a gay man from entering a hospital to sit by the bed of his dying partner of 50 years. . . .  [Obama's] reluctance was always about the word "marriage" and was never so extreme as to allow this sort of rank cruelty -- the height of immorality.

Romney has said he even opposes civil unions "if they're identical to marriage other than by name."    Frank points out that:

. . .  Romney admits that what matters to him is giving gay people fewer rights than straight people. Holding onto the "m" word is not enough for Romney types; they need to feel superior. Romney's position can be based on no other principle than casting gay people as lesser. . . . 

Consider the episode of the prep school Romney "policing" his classmates' conformity in hair style by pinning down a frightened and tearful boy and cutting off his long, bleached hair, after yelling to his accomplices, "He can't look like that. That's wrong.  Just look at him!"

As he now apologizes for "going too far," Romney insists that he had no idea at the time that the boy might be gay.

That is, he bullied the boy not because he knew him to be gay, but because he looked nonconformist, specifically gender-nonconforming.

In other words, his practice was to police norms for no other reason than to police norms. And here's why that's important: Romney's only stated reason for opposing LGBT equality . . .  is that heterosexuality is a longstanding norm. As he said in a primary debate, "Three thousand years of human history shouldn't be discarded so quickly."

So Romney would uphold discrimination and unequal treatment of gays and lesbians for no better reason than "it's always been this way."   As Frank says:

"Tell that to the opponents of 

slavery, stoning, and segregation."

That's powerful stuff.

Ralph