Romney’s same-sex marriage flip flops

Deal Hudson provides as good a summary as I’ve seen on how Mitt Romney is in fact responsible for same-sex marriages being performed in Massachusetts today. I’ve blogged the bullet points before:

1. The state constitution gives jurisdiction over all maters related to marriage to the governor and governor’s council.
2. The constitution allows for the removal of judges without cause by a bill of address and he could have done so with the activist judges of the state Supreme Judicial Court.
3. He could have approached Goodridge like the Dred Scott decision and ordered that licenses be granted to only those same-sex couples who had gone through the same litigation and received an order from the court.
4. The constitution says only the legislature may change laws, not courts, and the legislature never changed the state’s marriage law. So why did Romney order city clerks to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses on May 17, 2004?

Yet ever since that day in 2004 Romney has been portraying himself as a champion of traditional marriage and against “activist judges” and same-sex marriage, taking his dog-and-pony show on the road across the country.

Like with his claims regarding abortion and gay rights, Romney apparently says and does one thing when it’s politically expedient and then says and does another when it’s not and expects the rest of us to forget his flip-flop.

Meanwhile, Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online discusses Romney’s “Mormon problem”, likening it to John F. Kennedy’s “Catholic problem,” and examines some ways he could address it. He could go the JFK route and downplay his religion and how much of a role it will play in his political life. Or, she says, he could go the George Washington route, laid out in his farewell address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness — these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”

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