Just ran across this exclusive from Jennifer Rubin at the WashPost:
Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.
In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:
I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.
According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign…
And I couldn’t believe it.
I know what you’re thinking: What? Romney had an openly gay adviser? Even for a second?
Yep, that’s what I was thinking, too. Who’da thunk it?
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I suspect that Mr. Romney is not going to be allowed to project himself as centrist as he might wish.
I am a social conservative but I find the behavior of the anti-gay group appalling and atypical of closed minds who never stop to consider that you need to look at the job the person is doing first, never pulling the bedsheets back and sticking their damn noses where they do not belong. If you do, you leave yourself open to criticism and you invite others to scrutinize your life with a microscope.
What will others find if they pull yours back?
As a small government supporter, all I have to say to those responsible for driving a qualified person out of the campaign, what you are engaging in is indirect government intervention by fiat when you refuse to allow a person to participate in the political process because of their sexual orientation.
[like] what Bart said!
This will haunt Romney.
I am a social conservative but I find the behavior of the anti-gay group appalling …
-Bart
A social conservative, BY DEFINITION, is anti-gay.
“A social conservative, BY DEFINITION, is anti-gay.”…bud
bud, are you calling me a liar, hypocrite or are you choosing to make an acidulous “out of context” observation of the definition by singling out just one of the many adjectives/nouns used to describe a “social conservative”?
Or, are “social conservatives” who generally adhere to Judeo-Christian values identified only by their objection to the “gay lifestyle” and therefore automatically labeled as “anti-gay”?
I am “anti-gay” when it comes to my “PERSONAL” choice of my private lifestyle. But, it is not up to me to judge others and how they choose to live their lives.
My “social conservatism” doesn’t preclude having gay friends, which I do, but I do not have to participate in their lifestyle activities either.
As for your choice of highlighting “BY DEFINITION” for whatever reason other than an attempt to discredit my comments, as a polite reminder, in the past you adamantly denied being a “leftist”, someone who is just as intolerant of others as are their counterparts on the right.
Yet, “BY DEFINITION”, a “leftist” is “a person who belongs to the political left”.
Is your definition acumen a precursor to define Kathryn, Phillip, and a few others as “leftists” by a narrow, “out of context” definition or are they liberals who use reasonable arguments and offer logic when they present their points of view instead of regurgitating the usual and expected strict ideological propaganda?
What happens if they don’t believe in a narrow definition of some of their liberal positions and refuse to hold it against others and do not attempt to marginalize their opinions because they do not “march in lockstep” with their liberal convictions “in toto”? After careful reading of their comments, one or two actually have what could be considered viewpoints compatible with “social conservatism”.
So, where are the pigeonholes and coops where all of the people live who may not adhere to every tenet of a definition of a basic belief system or ideology if you prefer? Maybe they do not exist because there would be too many to provide for the lack of strict “BY DEFINITION” adherents.
However, the ones that house the fanatical adherents to a strict classification of narrowly held belief systems are around but very few exist because inhabitants are much smaller in numbers than the intelligent ones who refuse to be “pigeon holed”.
Yet they receive too much notice because they shout and scream from their respective mountain and roof tops and disrupt the civility of discourse between reasonable adults who understand there is actually more than one aspect of an issue to be considered and pigeonholes are strictly “for the birds”.
Well said on both comments, Bart.