Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s ceremonial leaving of office last week had all the Hollywood glitter that we have come to expect from the presumed presidential candidate.
At 5 p.m. Jan. 3, he left his corner office in the Statehouse and made his way down a red carpet, greeting well-wishers all along the way. Live television cameras followed the entire, 25-minute “lone-walk,” ending with a 19-gun salute. The front page of the next day’s Boston Herald screamed, “WASN’T I GREAT!” using a photo of Romney waving to the cameras with his wife in tow.
Holding the event a day before the inauguration of Democrat Deval Patrick as governor, as would have been traditional, allowed Romney to garner the spotlight. Whether social conservative Republican primary voters — whom Romney is trying to woo — will shine that same spotlight on his history as governor of Massachusetts remains to be seen. If they do, they will not like what they find.
Of course, Romney has issued all of the right rhetoric to capture the religious right’s vote. Romney’s presumable campaign motto (it graces his presidential exploratory committee Web site), would be funny were it not so insulting. “America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home.”
Never mind the grammatical imprecision and redundancy of the statement (what other “family of nations” is there other than that which exists “around the world?”) how can one possibly connect gay marriage — which, doubtless, Romney means by the “collapse of the family here at home” — to our international standing?
Support for America’s global preeminence ought to cut across partisan lines, and judging from the statements of the presumed presidential candidates (with the possible exception of Dennis Kucinich), there is little reason to believe that it is not a shared conviction among the contenders.
And there are more convincing reasons — more convincing, that is, then the potentiality of gay marriage — why international respect for our country has slipped in recent years. Many of them (too many to list in this space) can be laid at the feet of the Bush administration, not Adam and Steve.
Perhaps Romney sees the denigration of gay couples as a way to win over the Muslim street’s hearts and minds. His beliefs on gay marriage are more in line with those of the theocrats we are trying to defeat, and not the Western democracies.
But here’s the rub: Romney has crafted himself into a conservative hero standing athwart gay rights, yet his record is entirely contradictory. To choose one of many examples, in 2003 he issued a proclamation declaring May 17, “Massachusetts Gay/Straight Youth Pride Day.” This act was of a piece with a series of statements of support for gay rights when Romney ran for Senate here in 1994 and governor in 2002; in both races he won the endorsement of the Log Cabin Republicans and no one seriously considered him making gay issues the crux of any future campaign, as he has now.
In other words, Romney’s rhetoric is about as profound as the usual tripe uttered on the red carpets from Hollywood to Cannes. How fitting that he left the governorship standing on one.
James Kirchick is assistant to the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.
