Are Gay Men Welcome in the G.O.P.? Posted by Alex Koppelman For a little while there, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Presidential nominee of the Grand Old Party, was going to have an openly gay man as one of his campaign spokesmen. As of yesterday, that isn’t true anymore.
Richard Grenell, who’d worked in the Administration of the second President Bush, was supposed to start his new job as a foreign-policy spokesman for the Romney campaign yesterday. Instead, he resigned. According to Jennifer Rubin, a blogger for the Washington Post who’s been a staunch Romney supporter, Grenell’s resignation came as a result of complaints social conservatives made about his hiring; that had been going on ever since he joined the campaign, but, according to Rubin, he decided to resign because he felt he was being kept “under wraps.” It would be easy to react to Grenell’s decision by saying, as Teddy Goff, the digital director of Obama for America, did, “Today we learned that in the year 2012, a Republican nominee for President can’t have a gay person as spokesman.” Easy—but wrong. The issue isn’t sexuality, per se, but it does appear to be about the degree of openness about sexuality—and about the Romney campaign’s continuing efforts to woo social conservatives. The G.O.P. establishment has long tolerated gay men who were open to some degree about their sexual orientation—their bosses knew, their co-workers knew, their friends knew, their family knew, but the public didn’t. (Michelangelo Signorile once dubbed this sort of thing “the glass closet”—in the closet, but with some people allowed to see in.) Even Rick Santorum, back when he was a senator, had as his director of communications Robert Traynham, a gay man who was reportedly out to his boss for some time before he was publicly outed by the activist Mike Rogers. There are plenty of other gay men working at high levels in the Republican Party: Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager for Bush’s reëlection, and later the chairman of the Republican National Committee, for instance. His sexuality was for years only barely secret, though he didn’t officially come out until a few years after he left his post at the R.N.C. And, of course, Grenell himself worked in the last Republican Administration. Having an openly gay spokesman is something different, though, even at a time when attitudes about issues like same-sex marriage have shifted dramatically, as Anne Stringfield noted in her post yesterday about North Carolina’s Amendment 1. That’s especially true for someone like Mitt Romney. He’s no Nixon going to China; his credentials as a conservative are already suspect, and social-conservative groups saw this as another sign that he can’t really be trusted. It didn’t help that Grenell was outspoken about his sexuality and about his position on same-sex marriage. The real irony: if Rick Santorum had been the nominee, it might have been a different story. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/05/mitt-romney-spokesman-richard-grenell-resigns.html#ixzz1tkaXRZj4 -- Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time. Have a great day, Tommy -- Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time. Have a great day, Tommy -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more.
