Posted on 01/07/2008 6:18:49 AM PST by xzins
Is Mitt Romney Conservative?
by Gary Glenn Chairman, Campaign for Michigan Families
The Washington, D.C. conservative weekly Human Events last year listed Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in its Top Ten list of RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), ranking him at number 8 in the nation with the following entry:
"Has said, ’I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.’ Supports (homosexual) civil unions and stringent gun laws. After visiting Houston, he criticized the city’s aesthetics, saying, ’This is what happens when you don’t have zoning.’" (Human Events)
Romney should have ranked even higher on the list of RINOs. He famously likes to tell conservative audiences in Iowa and South Carolina that being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.
I attended last fall’s GOP conference in Michigan, where Romney continued his masquerade as a "conservative," even daring to tell the assembled activists: "I am pro-life" -- knowing full well that he does not mean by that term what those listening would think he meant.
Romney’s ten-year political career has occurred from his late 40s to his late 50s, yet he asks pro-family conservatives to naively believe that he’s just now figuring out his core beliefs.
During that decade, he has insistently supported legal abortion-on-demand. In a televised 1994 campaign debate, Romney said: "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time when my Mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice. ...Since that time, my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter, and you will not see my wavering on that." (Boston Globe)
His 2002 gubernatorial campaign web site stated: "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." (Archive)
Romney’s response to the National Abortion Rights Action League’s 2002 candidate survery: ’’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. The truth is, no candidate in the governor’s race in either party would deny women abortion rights." (Notably, Romney refused to answer Massachusetts Citizens for Life’s candidate questionnaire.) (Boston Globe)
Not surprisingly, Romney’s clearly stated support for Roe and "a woman’s right to choose" -- i.e., abortion on demand -- earned him the endorsement of the pro-abortion Republican Majority for Choice PAC.
He was also endorsed, twice, by the homosexual "Log Cabin Republicans," the same group that in 2004 spent $1 million attacking President Bush for his support of a Marriage Protection Amendment.
Romney believes the Boy Scouts should allow openly homosexual Scoutmasters: "I feel that all people should be allowed to participate in the Boy Scouts regardless of their sexual orientation." (Web today)
He endorses Ted Kennedy’s federal "gay rights" legislation. He endorses taxpayer-financed same-sex benefits for the homosexual partners of state employees, and even attacked some Democratic legislators for not supporting such government benefits.
According to the Associated Press, he has appointed at least two openly homosexual lawyers to state judgeships, one a board member of the Lesbian & Gay Bar Association. Imagine how that will fly in Republican presidential primaries in the South, the prospect of a president with a record of appointing homosexual activists to the bench. (See copy of gubernatorial news release below.)
In 2002, before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized so-called homosexual "marriage," Romney denounced a preemptive state Marriage Protection Amendment prohibiting homosexual "marriage," civil unions, or same-sex public employee benefits as "too extreme," even after being advised by the media that his own wife and son had just signed a petition to place it on the ballot. (Boston Phoenix)
Now, as he postures to run for president, Romney travels to Iowa and Michigan and South Carolina to claim he’s "pro-life" and brag about fighting homosexual "marriage," saying that at age 59, his position on such issues has "evolved."
(No flip-flop so far, however, on his stated support for homosexual Scoutmasters, forcing taxpayers to fund spousal benefits for the "partners" of state employees involved in homosexual relationships, or Kennedy’s federal "gay rights" legislation.)
Regardless, most pro-family voters don’t believe in the theory of evolution -- including as it applies to politicians, and especially when the alleged "evolution" seems so conveniently timed to produce political benefit.
Gov. Romney can tell all the cattle-rancher-at-a-vegetarian-convention jokes he wants about Massachusetts. But they’re going to fall flat when social conservatives learn -- and they will -- that his long-term record on abortion and elements of homosexual activists’ political agenda has been that of Vegetarian in Chief.
Persons Born Outside the United States to Citizen Parents:
This bill clarifies that the term “natural born Citizen” includes children born outside the United States to citizen parents. This provision provides comfort and certainty to members of the American military and foreign services, as well as expatriate families, that their children, too, are eligible to run for president. These children are no less qualified than children born on American soil, and they should not be treated differently. Of course, children born to American citizens abroad would only be eligible to run for president if they satisfied the fourteen year residency requirement in addition to the “natural born” requirement.
Here's a dose of reality for you. George Romney was born in Mexico. He was not eligible to be the President, yet he ran for the office.
Article II, Section 1:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Good article. Thanks for posting.
Mitt Romney is not a conservative.
You are absolutely correct, P-M.
And the questioning of George Romney’s citizenship status included the fact that his parents were Mexican citizens.
If I am born to Mexican parents, can I be President if I have been born in Mexico?
Certainly.
You can be President..... of..... Mexico.
Here’s a dose of reality for you.
Although it is generally accepted that birth-right citizenship includes both those born on U.S. soil and overseas to U.S. citizen parents, it was not always the case, said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a constitutional scholar who will shortly become dean of Georgetown University Law School in Washington.
In 1790, he said, Congress passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which gave citizenship to children born overseas if the father was a U.S. citizen. In 1934, it was extended to include the children of mothers who were citizens.
But whether people born in those circumstances can serve as president has never been set in legal concrete because it has never been challenged, said Aleinikoff, who specializes in citizenship issues.
“The Constitution does not say you have to be born in the United States, so there is room to decide what ‘natural born’ means, but the informal interpretation that we all accept has never been tested,” he said.
“Clearly, though,” he said in an interview, the Constitution “indicates anybody who is naturalized is not natural born, and this is a ridiculous provision.”
“The Constitution does not say you have to be born in the United States, so there is room to decide what ‘natural born’ means, but the informal interpretation that we all accept has never been tested,” he said.
************************************************************
Some think that it has been tested. Some day the court will have to tell us what “ natural Born” is but to day we only have an informal understanding. If this has been tested I would like them to tell me when and where.
And the questioning of George Romney’s citizenship status included the fact that his parents were Mexican citizens.
*********************************************************
That would be true if they ( hid parents ) were Mexican citizens. My mother was born in Canada does that make me a Canadian. I don’t think so. My sister is a Canadian only because she denounced her US Citizenship to become a Canadian.
Every Five years I had to make lengthy update to my history file. The officials from the government agency agreed that I was not foreign born because my mother or grandparents had not denounced their US citizenship. Ones citizenship can not be taken involuntarily. I don’t think that you make the laws or interpret them.
Again I ask did George Romney’s Parents voluntarily give up there US citizenship to become Mexican. Living out side the US does not remove your Citizenship or your ability to transfer that citizenship to you children.
You have not presented proof.
The following article (see underlined section at the bottom) gives the reason why George Romney's eligibility for the Presidency had been questioned. George Romney was born in Mexico to parents who had apparently EMIGRATED to Mexico because of conflict with US polygamy laws.
If I give up my US citizenship and move back to Germany, and have a child born there, is that child a US citizen. That's the question. It is not an anchor baby. It is not a natural born citizen. And it is not born out of country to a US citizen.
That is why there were questions. They never had to be answered. George Romney dropped out of the race.
Romney Family Tree Has Polygamy Branch
By JENNIFER DOBNER and GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press Writers
Saturday, February 24, 2007
While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church, the Republican presidential candidate's great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.
Polygamy was not just a historical footnote, but a prominent element in the family tree of the former Massachusetts governor now seeking to become the first Mormon president.
Romney's great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, married his fifth wife in 1897. That was more than six years after Mormon leaders banned polygamy and more than three decades after a federal law barred the practice.
Romney's great-grandmother, Hannah Hood Hill, was the daughter of polygamists. She wrote vividly in her autobiography about how she "used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow" over her own husband's multiple marriages.
Romney's great-great grandfather, Parley Pratt, an apostle in the church, had 12 wives. In an 1852 sermon, Parley Pratt's brother and fellow apostle, Orson Pratt, became the first church official to publicly proclaim and defend polygamy as a direct revelation from God.
Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued "The Manifesto" banning polygamy.
"When you read the family's history, you realize how important polygamy was to them," said Todd Compton, a Mormon and independent historian who wrote a book about the polygamous life of the church's founder, Joseph Smith. "They left America and started again as pioneers, after they had done it over and over again previously."
B. Carmon Hardy, a polygamy expert and retired history professor at California State University-Fullerton, said polygamy was "a very important part of Miles Park Romney's family."
Hardy added: "Now, very gradually, as you moved farther away from it, it became less a part of it. But during the time of Miles Park Romney, it was an essential principle of the Romney family life."
Other Mormons have run for the White House, including Romney's father in 1968 and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in 2000. But Mitt Romney's stature as a leading 2008 contender has renewed questions about his faith and its doctrines.
At the same time, polygamy remains a part of current events.
HBO is airing a television series, "Big Love," that features a man in Utah — where the Mormon church is based — with three wives. Self-proclaimed "Mormon fundamentalist" Warren Jeffs, formerly on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, is facing multiple felony charges for sex crimes related to underage marriages among members of his breakaway church's 10,000 members in Utah and Arizona, who openly practice polygamy.
Romney has joked about polygamy, saying in various settings that to him, "marriage is between a man and a woman ... and a woman and a woman." But in serious moments he has called the practice "bizarre" and noted his church excommunicates those who engage in it.
An introductory film played at his fundraisers and campaign appearances features his wife, Ann, talking about their 37-year marriage. Romney himself notes they started as high school sweethearts.
This month, Ann Romney tried a different tack, taking a lighthearted jab at her husband's main Republican competitors, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as she introduced Romney at a Missouri GOP dinner.
The biggest difference between her husband and the other candidates, Ann Romney said, is that "he's had only one wife."
McCain has been married twice; Giuliani three times.
The Romney campaign had no comment for this story.
Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon church in 1830, quietly introduced polygamy. He believed it had roots in the Old Testament and was necessary to reach the highest salvation in heaven. Smith is believed to have had 33 wives.
Brigham Young expanded the practice after the church's migration from the Midwest to Utah, which began in 1846. He is said to have had 55 wives. Historical texts show Young also asked Orson Pratt to publicly proclaim the church's belief in polygamy in 1852.
In 1862, while Utah was a territory, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, banning plural marriage. In 1882, Congress also passed the Edmunds Act, an anti-polygamy law. That was followed in 1887 by the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which disincorporated the church and threatened to seize its nonreligious real estate as part of the crackdown on polygamy.
In 1890, Mormon President Wilford Woodruff issued "The Manifesto," in which he declared the church no longer taught or permitted plural marriages.
Nonetheless, the law of polygamy — Smith's revelation that God authorized polygamy — remains in Article 132 of the church's Doctrine and Covenants. In addition, Mormon widowers who remarry today believe they will live in eternity with their multiple wives.
Mormon genealogical records, among the most detailed and complete of any religion, show that two of Mitt Romney's great-great grandfathers, Miles Romney and Parley Pratt, had 12 wives each.
Compton, the polygamy scholar, disputes that. He believes Miles Romney only had one wife because the records do not show the dates for his other 11 marriages or any offspring from them.
Miles Romney and his one clearly documented wife, Elizabeth Gaskell, had 10 children. Among them was Miles Park Romney, one of Mitt Romney's great-grandfathers.
Miles Park Romney had five wives. With his first wife, Hannah Hood Hill, he had 11 children. Among them was Gaskell Romney, Mitt Romney's paternal grandfather.
Hannah Hood Hill's autobiography offers an eyewitness account of the Romney family's polygamous past. Hardy, the Cal-State historian, found it amid research for his upcoming book, "Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy."
Hood Hill wrote of Miles Park Romney: "I felt that was more than I could endure, to have him divide his time and affections from me. I used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow. If anything will make a woman's heart ache, it is for her husband to take another wife. ... But I put my trust in my heavenly father, and prayed and pleaded with him to give me strength to bear this great trial."
Miles Park Romney's final marriage, to Emily Eyring Smith, came in 1897, more than six years after "The Manifesto."
Gaskell Romney, Mitt Romney's grandfather, was not a polygamist. He married Anna Amelia Pratt, the daughter of polygamists and the granddaughter of Parley Pratt, the apostle with 12 wives. Their marriage took place Feb. 20, 1895, in Dublan, Mexico.
Gaskell Romney had moved to Mexico with his parents in 1884 amid the proliferation of U.S. laws prohibiting "unlawful cohabitation." Anna Pratt was born in Utah, but had emigrated to Mexico and lived in one of nine Mormon colonies established over the border.
Gaskell Romney and Anna Pratt had seven children, including George Wilcken Romney, the former Michigan governor. He lived with his parents in Mexico until 1912, when the family returned to the United States.
George Romney married Lenore LaFount, who does not appear to have polygamy in her family tree. The couple, now deceased, had four children, including Mitt Romney.
TORT: “If he had a track record of saying one thing and doing another, I would share your concern.”
How about if he had a record of saying things that are so easily and demonstrably false?
Which indicates either a willingness to knowingly lie, or a compulsive personality disorder. Not sure which would be worse in a man with the power of the presidency.
Here’s the record...
The Myths of Mitt Romney
“Making it up as he goes along”
MANCHESTER UNION LEADER: “Last week Romney was reduced to debating what the meaning of ‘saw’ is. It was only the latest in a string of demonstrably false claims — he’d been a hunter ‘pretty much’ all his life, he’d had the NRA’s endorsement, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. himself — that call into question the veracity of his justifications for switching sides on immigration, abortion, taxes and his affection for Ronald Reagan. In this primary, the more Mitt Romney speaks, the less believable he becomes.”
BOSTON GLOBE: “(Romney) ended the week trying to explain a discrepancy between assertion and fact... It hurt because it’s a reminder of discrepancies between assertion and fact when it comes to Romney’s overall conservative credentials.”
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/08/guns_trust_and_romney
EYE ON 08.COM: “This is important because it goes to character. Romney struggles to tell the truth and keep his story straight about basic facts about his own life. He also struggles to keep his story straight on issues like abortion, gay rights, taxes, guns... It is clear what Romney is doing. He is just making it up as he goes along. He is making himself up as he goes along.”
http://www.eyeon08.com/2007/04/07/lifetime-hunter-mitt-romney-never-had-license/
Romney said his father marched
with Martin Luther King. He didn’t.
BOSTON GLOBE: “Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father march with Martin Luther King, Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised speech this month.”
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/21/romney_never_saw_father_on_king_march
Romney said he marched with
Martin Luther King. He didn’t.
BOSTON GLOBE: “Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about...racial discrimination, he said: ‘My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.’ Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. ‘Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King,’ he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.”
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/21/romney_never_saw_father_on_king_march
Romney said his devoutly religious mother
campaigned for abortion rights. She didn’t.
BOSTON GLOBE: “(Former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman Elly) Peterson is dumbfounded to hear that Mitt Romney has described his mother as having been an abortion rights supporter during (her 1970 U.S. Senate) campaign. ‘If it happened, I’d remember it,’ she said in a telephone interview. ‘It didn’t, and I don’t.’ ...Lenore Romney’s campaign stance is relevant only because her son...raised it in 1994 during a debate with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and he has been sending mixed signals on abortion ever since. ‘I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country,’ he said in 1994. ‘I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate.’ ...Detroit Free Press archives yielded no (Lenore Romney) campaign references to abortion...’The idea that Lenore would defy her church is hard to believe,’ Peterson said.”
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/06/26/evolving_history
Romney said: “I wasn’t pro-choice.”
Romney said: “I was pro-choice.”
Which is it, Mitt?
FOX NEWS SUNDAY: “I never called myself pro-choice. I never allowed myself to use the word ‘pro-choice,’ because I didn’t feel I was pro-choice. I would protect the law, I said, as it was, but I wasn’t pro-choice.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293017,00.html
ASSOCIATED PRESS: “I think I’ve made it very clear. I was pro-choice, or effectively pro-choice, when I ran in 1994 (and 2002).”
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hjo2zpLNAjtxCVkBA1Xn9FYQ5tpQD8TK3G500
Romney said he was endorsed by the
National Rifle Association. He wasn’t.
WASHINGTON POST: “Under Russert’s grilling about guns on this morning’s ‘Meet the Press,’ former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney claimed an endorsement he’d never won. ...’I also was pleased to have the support of the NRA when I ran for governor. I sought it, I seek it now. ...I told you what my position was, and what I did as governor; the fact that I received the endorsement of the NRA.’ The problem? He was never endorsed by the NRA ... ‘The NRA did not endorse in the 2002 campaign,’ said (Romney campaign) spokesman Kevin Madden, when asked about Romney’s comments.”
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2007/12/16/romney_claims_nra_endorsement.html
Romney said: “I have a gun
of my own.” He doesn’t.
BOSTON GLOBE: “’I have a gun of my own. I go hunting myself. I’m a member of the NRA and believe firmly in the right to bear arms,’ Romney said. Asked by reporters at the gun show Friday whether he personally owned the gun, Romney said he did not.”
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/01/14/romney_retreats_on_gun_control
Romney said he’s been a hunter “all
my life.” Twice. Once every forty years.
BOSTON GLOBE: “This week in Keene, N.H., Romney told a man in an NRA hat that he had ‘been a hunter pretty much all of my life,’ the Associated Press reported. The Romney campaign later acknowledged that Romney, 60, hunted one summer as a teenager and once in his late 50’s.”
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/08/guns_trust_and_romney
ASSOCIATED PRESS: “Officials in the four states where Mitt Romney has lived say the Republican presidential contender, who calls himself a lifelong hunter, never took out a license.”
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/04/07/romney_defends_lack_of_hunting_license
What I would want to hear is a question to Romney on why he claimed one thing which he now agrees did not happen.
Forgetful? Family stories, i.e., that dad marched with MLK or mom for abortion rights?
The question is whether it is knowing deceipt as opposed to sloppiness.
The more troubling position for me is his stance against the BSA.
Regarding MLK, it is clear that Romney was leading the GOP in that era. Really doesn't matter, since his acts in leadership for civil rights shut down a claim of a call to authority to cover what one did not really stand for.
It sounds like you are part of Romney’s campaign staff or you were paid by the Romney campaign to post this.
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