Dec 22, 2006  |  By: JAMES KIRCHICK  | COMMENTS     

BELIEVE IT OR not, but in the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race, Bay State governor and presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney ran to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay rights.

That Romney would have run to the left of Ted Kennedy — who so corpulently embodies the catchphrase “big government” — on any issue, never mind one as loaded as gay rights, might sound preposterous, but it’s all in writing.

Last week, Bay Windows, a Boston gay newspaper, reprinted excerpts from a letter Romney wrote to the Log Cabin Republicans in 1994, hoping to gain the group’s support in his campaign against the veteran Democratic lawmaker and Massachusetts institution.

“If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern,” Romney wrote. “My opponent cannot do this. I can and will.”

Romney lost that race by a wide margin, but came closer to defeating Kennedy than had any previous challenger in recent memory. Romney’s support for the gay community did not end with his loss, however, as his political aspirations dictated otherwise. At the Boston Gay Pride Parade in 2002, when he ran for governor, he and his running mate Kerry Healey distributed pink fliers stating, “Mitt and Kerry wish you a great Pride weekend.”

TWELVE YEARS LATER, Ted Kennedy actually supports “equality for gays and lesbians” as he has been a forthright backer of gay marriage and an outspoken opponent of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has made himself the poster boy for conservative opposition to gay marriage, conveniently positioned as he is at the geographical epicenter of the debate. The thought of Romney attending a Pride parade today is unthinkable. It is unlikely he would make it out alive.

Rather than making gay equality a mainstream concern, Romney has used the gays whom he was courting just four years ago as part of his nationwide comedy routine. That Romney is supposedly the lone sane person in a commonwealth full of radicals has become the crux of his presidential narrative. His stock line at GOP fundraising dinners across the country is that his being governor of Massachusetts is akin to being a “cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.”

Romney won the governorship there in 2002 on reformist credentials; he parachuted in not long after cleaning up the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Olympics.

Romney’s flip-flop on gay rights is part and parcel with a radical shift toward the right in his single term as Massachusetts governor. In a 1994 interview with Bay Windows, when asked about his views toward “conservative Republicans like Pat Robertson or Jesse Helms,” Romney came just short of decrying them outright. Yet the mention of those men’s names conjured the memory of his father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, “fighting to keep the John Birch Society from playing too strong a role in the Republican Party,” and his walking out of the 1964 GOP convention after presidential nominee Barry Goldwater pronounced that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

SINCE THIS INTERVIEW, Romney has appeared as a guest on Robertson’s popular Christian television program “700 Club” and has made outreach to religious conservatives a crucial part of his campaign.

Poor Mitt Romney. As he will soon discover, the evangelical Christian right will brook no opposition to their “values” agenda. They can spot a phony when they see one and are not so cynical as to endorse a charlatan like Romney over someone who has a track record on their issues. There are other potential candidates who fit their bill, who lack the baggage of past expressions of pro-gay support. Sen. Sam Brownback immediately comes to mind.

Romney was unmistakable in his support for gay equality in 1994 and that he would now come out in favor of laws that explicitly ban gay equality indicates one of two possibilities: that his views about the rights of gays underwent a complete and utter transformation in a four-year period or that Romney did the math and figured that he would have a better chance of winning his party’s nomination if he ran to the right of John McCain.

So, is Mitt Romney a hypocrite, an opportunist or a nihilist? Can I choose all three?