My Romney Problem

We'll call him Brandon. He was friends with a guy he had met in the cast of a play he was in.

Good friends. The other guy, "Craig," was about to move across the country, and this was a big deal for them. Such a big deal that a couple of days before Craig's departure, the two of them spent the day at a distant beach location, to have "quality time" before Craig left for good.

Brandon and Craig were in love. Not, as far as we all knew, involved. A friend who knew them better than I do thinks nothing romantic ever happened. Regardless, you know love when you see it. That beach thing was not typical of men who are friends. It is precisely the kind of thing lovers do.

But Brandon was a Mormon, and Mormons outright reject homosexuality. A Mormon who is gay is no longer allowed to be a Mormon. This leaves gay Mormons in an especially agonizing situation, because Mormonism is less a weekend ritual than an all-encompassing way of life.

A gay Baptist is not in a great spot, but he can fashion a certain equipoise to make it work. Mormonism leaves no room for this kind of compromise. If you're not straight, you're gone, no questions asked. You can't come to church or be a part of it. You're expelled from what has been most of your whole life, outside of your job, the only life you've ever known.

So Brandon could be in love with Craig, but only in the abstract. Walks on the beach were it.

Later Brandon popped up with a nice Mormon fiancee. You couldn't help noticing that he did not have the glow he had always had around Craig. He introduced his fiancee with a certain restraint, a forced smile. He knew that we knew it was a sham.

The fiancee was a very buttoned-up sort with an antique name, I'll substitute Henrietta for it. The two of them looked odd together. She did not match Brandon in terms of charisma, wit, temperament, or even appearance.

It reminded me of a couple of other men I knew in college and graduate school, whose girlfriends didn't match them in the same way. After these men opened up to their sexuality, you realized that what had been odd about their relationships with those girlfriends had been that attraction and chemistry had not been why they had chosen them. They had chosen them to fill out a fiction.

I presume Brandon and Henrietta are together still and have kids. I also presume that Brandon is living a life of quiet desperation. Like another Mormon I know, of similar orientation, who has settled for celibacy. Or some years ago, Mormonism made the news recently and my driver on the book tour and I got to talking about it. From our conversation I gleaned, although she did not get specific, that she was another gay Mormon, her life stained and stunted by her religion's rejection of what she is.

Despite how much I have heard about how "presidential" Mitt Romney has seemed in the Republican candidates' debates lately, I cannot help being as viscerally resistant to accepting him as a prospective leader of our land as others were to the Catholicism of Al Smith in the 1920s or later to John F. Kennedy.

It's not about polygamy — I know that's all but irrelevant to Mormonism today. What I cannot abide is Mormonism's starkly official revulsion at the simple fact that some humans are sexually attracted to other humans of the same gender.

Mr. Romney would see Brandon, I presume, as having made the right decision. He condones the condemnation of countless good people to either living with passionless sex or none — because of some anti-Enlightenment writings in an old book. How could someone proposing himself as the steward of our great nation concur, in 2007, with views on homosexuality which in the future will look as blinkered as witch hunting does now?

If Mr. Romney does not concur with this primitivism but lets it pass, I see this as thoroughly ugly as well.

This position on gays is no prettier in any other religion. I would have the same feeling about a devout Muslim candidate, for example. But for now, the representative of explicitly policed bigotry on homosexuality proposing himself as commander in chief is Mr. Romney.

He can "answer questions" about his religion all he wants, making it sound like some apple-cheeked "church group." I, however, watch him and recall that tragically strained smile on Brandon's face introducing Henrietta that night.

And I say no.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.