Mitt Romney’s much-discussed Washington Post oped, published just days before he is sworn in as Utah’s new junior senator, shows that he is not what the Republican Party needs today, tomorrow, or in 2020 to resurrect the Republican Party.
In classic Romney fashion, he writes on the one hand that President Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office.” On the other, he credits Trump with a lengthy list of achievements that “mainstream Republicans have promoted for years” such as the 2017 tax bill, Trump’s conservative judicial appointments, and his tough stance with China.
Nevermind that mainstream Republicans, pre-Trump, would have never backed Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. No, the worst of Romney shines in the paragraph in which he defines leadership: “A president should unite us and inspire us to follow ‘our better angels.’ A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect.”
If only Romney were capable of such action himself. We could have used it when he was governor in the months leading up to May 17, 2004, the day that same-sex couples in Massachusetts became the first in the nation to legally wed. In a harbinger of the ways in which support and/or contempt for Trump today divides families, support and/or opposition to marriage equality at that time ruined friendships and divided communities.
Public rhetoric was toxic and we needed a leader who would inspire us “to follow ‘our better angels'" by elevating public discourse on marriage equality “with comity and mutual respect.” Instead, we had Romney, who threw gas on the fire.
Just two weeks before the marriages were set to begin, Romney sought legal authority to file an emergency bill with the state legislature to stay the court ruling finding that same-sex couples had a right to marry. He angrily vowed that he would not let Massachusetts become “the Las Vegas of gay marriage” and announced that he would order municipal clerks to aggressively enforce a state law prohibiting out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts. (The law, which has since been repealed, was enacted in 1913 to ensure that interracial couples did not come to Massachusetts to get around their own states’ anti-miscegenation laws. It had not been enforced since 1976.)
Not surprisingly, tensions only rose and by May 17, the public’s safety was in danger. In his book, "Winning Marriage: The Inside Story of How Same-Sex Couples Took on the Politicians and Pundits ― And Won,” Marc Solomon, who ran the political campaign to win marriage equality in Massachusetts, writes: “With the religious right predicting Armageddon, it wasn’t beyond imagination that some crazed individuals would try to take matters into their own hands by using weapons to try to stop gays from marrying. … That day, May 17, sharpshooters were positioned on Boston rooftops, plainclothes police officers mixed in with the people celebrating on City Hall Plaza, and dozens of uniformed officers were assigned to protect Mary [Bonauto, the lead attorney for the marriage rights lawsuit] and the plaintiffs.”
At no time did Romney urge citizens of the Commonwealth to respect the court ruling ― and those who would be exercising their rights as a result of it. In Trumpian fashion, not only has Romney never taken responsibility for failing to act responsibly, but those who served in his gubernatorial administration continue to spin outlandish, revisionist tales of what happened during this tense political time.
In a 2016 podcast interview with David Axelrod, Romney’s former chief of staff Beth Myers said that you’d “have to look hard to find anyone — any gay couple that felt that their rights were trampled on [in] Massachusetts.” Actually, Myers wouldn’t need to look outside her place of employment to find such examples. Romney fired his commissioner of Child Care Services shortly after she married her same-sex partner. The same thing happened to his commissioner of the Department of Conservation and Recreation (though she may have been let go instead for refusing to hire a failed GOP state rep candidate).
This latest from Romney is a mash of sound and fury, signifying nothing more than what we already know: He’s not capable of leading the GOP from Trump.
Susan Ryan-Vollmar, a communications consultant, was formerly editor-in-chief of Bay Windows and news editor of the Boston Phoenix.
