enlarge

Wow. Here I thought Mitt Romney's cruel streak was in that he likes to fire people. Five of Romney's former classmates from a prestigious all-boys college prep school recall a "vicious" attack on a new student who Romney and others believed to be gay.

The Washington Post reports:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Romney never received any punishment for his actions.

Lauber was expelled from the school after being caught smoking on school grounds. He "came out" to family and close friends. Among other jobs, he later worked as a civilian contractor in Bosnia and Iraq. He died of liver cancer in 2004, according to his sisters.

DOWNLOADS: (1422)

PLAYS: (2537)

Embed

In Sunday morning's Concord Debate, asked what would happen if his son told him he was gay, Republican candidate Rick Santorum said, “I would love him as much as I did the second before he said it.”

But, Santorum has been asked that question before, and he had a different response at that time. In a 2003 interview, he was asked what he would tell a son who admitted to being attracted to men. Essentially, he said that his son should remain celibate.

“I would try to point out to them what is the right thing to do. And we have many temptations to do things we shouldn’t do,” he continued. “It doesn’t mean you have to submit.”

Santorum added that all parents should help steer their children in a direction “that would lead them to a better and happier life.”

Then, when pressed on whether he would still love his son, he replied, “It’s all you can do.”

That interview came after Santorum compared homosexuality to a host of illegal and devious acts.

He told The Associated Press in 2003, “If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual gay sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery, you have the right to anything.”

While it's difficult for me to imagine Santorum actually loving someone other than himself...I don't doubt for a second that the first thing he would do if one of his spawn were to admit to being gay would be to drop the child off at the Bachmann's Exorcism Clinic for Evil Gays.

Isn't it a little ironic, too, that the man with this medieval attitude towards gays is also the same man who blasted Barack Obama for "Hubris" and "Snobbery" for saying that he thinks all children should go to college?

“This is the kind of snobbery that we see from those that think they know how to run our lives. Rise up America, defend your own freedoms,” Santorum said of Obama's statement.

What about from those who want to tell you when to have sex, how to have sex, and with whom?

Like other states, Minnesota is fast-tracking a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between one man and one woman, despite already having a gay marriage ban on the books. I suppose they fear the law being declared unconstitutional and think that adding an amendment to the constitution with the definition will somehow immunize them from that.

The only good to come from this effort was the speech on the video above. Steve Simon, speaking in a measured, reasonable tone, made a wonderful argument for gay marriage by turning the argument against it right back around on the bill's proponents by arguing that if their sexuality is a gift from God, as clergy argues, then how many times does God have to bestow the gift of gay on someone before the rest of us get a clue? Between his delivery and his argument, it was magnificent.

Transcript follows.

Continue reading »