Mitt Romney's mixed record on gay
rights is the focus of a new campaign from two Democratic Super PACs.
Mitt Gets Worse launched on
Wednesday with video testimonials from four prominent gay rights
activists.
In one video, Julie Goodridge, who led
the fight for marriage equality in Massachusetts, remembers a meeting
with then-Governor Romney in which she asked him what she should tell
her daughter when she asked why her mothers could not marry.
Romney, according to Goodridge,
replied: “I don't really care … why don't you just tell her what
you've been telling her for the last eight years.”
“I have never in my life stood before
someone who had no capacity for empathy like Mitt Romney,”
Goodridge stated in the video. (The video is embedded in the right
panel of this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
“When he ran for governor, he said
and did a lot of the right things,” Adam Bink, director of Online
Programs at gay rights advocate Courage Campaign, said in a second
video. “He endorsed civil unions, he was endorsed by the Log Cabin
Republicans, he appointed openly gay people to office.”
“Mitt Romney tried to put the rights
of my friends up for a vote on the ballot. Not just to abolish
marriage but civil unions – that's a flip flop. He tried to veto
funding for HIV prevention programs. He issued an executive order to
abolish an LGBT youth commission. And he vetoed funding for LGBT
youth suicide prevention programs.”
The site is sponsored by the Courage
Campaign Super PAC and the American Bridge 21st Century.
“Whether [LGBT] people can start a
family, or visit someone in the hospital after an accident, these are
very real issues,” Chris Harris, a spokesman for American Bridge
21st Century, told U.S.
News and World Report. “And Romney has only gotten worse
on these issues.”
“He's thrown LGBT people in
Massachusetts under the bus and he'd do the same for the rest of
America if elected president,” the Courage Campaign said in a
statement.