However, to other pro-family leaders, Romney's purported pro-life conversion is hard to reconcile with the fact that as recently as 2002, he was still giving voice to pro-abortion rhetoric. For example: According to The Boston Globe, Romney, while responding to a 2002 "National Abortion Rights Action League" candidate survey, pledged, "I respect and will protect a woman's right to choose. This choice is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government's."
On his 2002 gubernatorial campaign Web site, Romney emphasized abortion in his campaign platform: "As Governor, Mitt Romney would protect the current pro-choice status quo in Massachusetts. No law would change. The choice to have an abortion is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not the government's."
Likewise, in 2002 Planned Parenthood posed the following question to candidate Romney in its campaign questionnaire: "Do you support the substance of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade?" Romney very simply and unequivocally replied, "Yes."
O.K. --you might say --that's fine. Romney was "pro-choice." This is America --people can change their opinion, right? Well, that may be true. Only one question --on the issues most important to conservative voters, why do Romney's opinions appear malleable, shifting in the wind as political expediency would seem to dictate?
In 2006, just four short years after he ran for governor and as his presidential ambitions were reaching a boiling point, Romney seemed to pull a 180. Sounding as though he'd lost a bet to Rush Limbaugh on a Patriots/Steelers game, Romney completely changed his tune on abortion and Roe v. Wade saying, "Roe v. Wade does not serve the country well and is another example of judges making the law instead of interpreting the Constitution."
Was Governor Romney the "Father of 'gay' marriage?" There's disagreement even within the pro-family legal community; however, there is a strong argument to be made that Romney, contrary to his pro-traditional marriage rhetoric, was chiefly responsible for unconstitutionally imposing "same-sex" marriage on Massachusetts and the rest of the country.
[...]In both his 1994 and 2002 political campaigns, Romney solicited and received the endorsement of the homosexual activist group "Log Cabin Republicans." In a 1994 letter to the Log Cabins, Romney promised that, "as we seek to establish full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent." Of course, Romney's opponent at the time was again, Ted Kennedy, one of the most liberal, pro-homosexual senators in U.S. history.
However, the Republican party has a long history of liberal converts in leadership positions. The best known is Ronald Reagan, a former liberal and president of the Screen Actors Guild, was converted to right-wing ideology while working for "General Electric Theater". After reading Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and under the considerable influence of his sponsor GE, Reagan came to "believe that liberals were naively leading the country down a road to serfdom". Little did he know that by taking on socialist ideology, he was in fact empowering the nation's fascists who were at least partly responsible for Hitler's rise to power.
So is Mitt Romney another patsy for the extreme right? He certainly is trying for it. Witness this white wash of his background by Newsweek.
MSNBC.com
Romney's campaign aides like to stress that he is a "turnaround" artist. They are referring to Romney's great success at salvaging failing companies as a venture capitalist in the 1980s and '90s and his near-miraculous rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from scandal and debt. The label carries the promise that Romney could reverse the fortunes of the GOP and the nation after the Bush years. But Romney's turnaround on the burning social issues of gay rights, stem-cell research and abortion has raised questions about the candidate's sincerity—a dangerous doubt at a time when voters seem to crave authenticity. In Massachusetts, as an unsuccessful Senate candidate in 1994 and in his winning race to become governor in 2002, Romney cast himself as liberal-to-moderate on social issues. But as Romney aims for the conservative Republican votes he will need to secure the presidential nomination, he has emerged as staunchly pro-life and anti-gay marriage. Was he, his critics ask, pretending then? Or is he pretending now?
Romney says he's always told the truth. On gay rights, he says, his basic views have not changed; rather, the political and cultural landscape has shifted. He still opposes discrimination against gays, but he does not favor recognizing gay marriage. "I never in a million years thought that we would have people of the same gender being told that they have a constitutional right to marry," Romney says. On the right to life, he did experience a turning point, he says, when he had to consider directly the morality of destroying human embryos in stem-cell research. [...]Questions about Romney's evolving views on abortion and gay rights could be a bigger issue with evangelicals than Romney's Mormonism, says Mark DeMoss, a Christian media strategist who's done evangelical outreach for the Romney campaign. A reconstruction of how Romney changed his views does not seriously challenge Romney's account of the evolution of his thinking, but it does suggest that political timing, as much as moral virtue, may have been on his mind.
[...]Romney is hardly the first Republican presidential candidate to be accused of expediency on social issues. Both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush moved to the right on abortion. A successful politician knows when to make compromises without appearing to abandon his or her dignity or moral compass. Romney's lifetime shows a history of getting along and going along—but also a capacity for boldness and an almost ruthless willingness to force change. MORE
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