Romney Runs Into Trouble On Gay Rights

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Governor Romney’s reversal of his decade-old stance in favor of federal gay rights legislation is angering gay Republicans and being met with skepticism from some conservatives who could be important to the Massachusetts politician’s prospects as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

“I don’t see the need for new or special legislation,” Mr. Romney said last week in response to a question about a bill first introduced in Congress in 1994, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. “My experience over the past several years as governor has convinced me that Enda would be an overly broad law that would open a litigation floodgate and unfairly penalize employers at the hands of activist judges,” the governor said in an interview posted on the Web site of a conservative magazine, National Review.

Mr. Romney acknowledged that his current opposition to the proposed federal law outlawing employment-related discrimination based on sexual orientation is at odds with his endorsement of the measure in 1994 when he was running to unseat Senator Kennedy, a Democrat.

A prominent gay Republican who backed Mr. Romney in that race accused the governor of abandoning his principles.

“I can’t really think of a politician, of the many I’ve met with over many years, who has done so many reversals on so many issues so quickly for such an obvious reason,” a former executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, Richard Tafel, told The New York Sun yesterday. “He’s doing everything he can and saying everything he can to contort himself to be the candidate of the right wing in the Republican Party primary.”

Mr. Tafel noted that in a 1994 letter to the Log Cabin group, Mr. Romney agreed not just to support the bill, but to co-sponsor it. The future governor also suggested at the time that he would “do better” at achieving gay equality than Mr. Kennedy had.

One social conservative active in Republican politics, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, said he was also dubious that Mr. Romney’s conversion on the issue was genuine. “I would have to hear a pretty good explanation before I’d buy it,” he said in an interview.

Gay rights advocates said they were unaware of any instance where Mr. Romney complained about or sought to overturn a Massachusetts law, passed in 1989, that banned employment discrimination against gays and lesbians in that state.

“Never. Not a word. This is all new,” a lesbian active in Democratic political circles in Boston, Mary Breslauer, said yesterday. “He never uttered anything about it in Massachusetts.”

The timing of Mr. Romney’s change of heart remains unclear. The governor’s office did not respond to the Sun’s queries last month about his position on the federal legislation. On November 28, the Sun reported that, judging by his 1994 statements on the bill, the governor appeared to stand to the left of Mr. McCain, who voted against the measure in 1996 and recently reaffirmed his position. On December 9, while Mr. Romney was on a trip to Asia, the 1994 letter surfaced in the New York Times. On December 12, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney’s political committee issued a statement to the Associated Press indicating that his views on the bill had changed. That statement tracks closely with his comments to National Review, which came in what the magazine described as an e-interview, where his answers may have been vetted by staffers.

Aides to Mr. Romney did not respond to questions yesterday about the timing and about whether the governor harbors qualms about the similar Massachusetts law.

Mr. Tafel said gay Republicans alienated by Mr. Romney’s about-face and his active opposition to same-sex marriage could direct their support to other potential contenders for 2008, such as Mr. Giuliani, who generally supports gay rights, and Mr. McCain, who has a mixed record on such issues. Mr. Tafel said some gays would overlook their disagreements with Mr. McCain because they perceive him as honest and consistent.

Mr. Tafel, who served as an aide to another Republican Massachusetts governor, William Weld, also took issue with Mr. Romney’s charge in the National Review interview that his opponents were stirring up stories about his old statements on gay rights. “This is someone who endorsed him,” Mr. Tafel said. “It’s a little disingenuous to say, ‘My opponents are dredging this up.'”


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