Totally unwilling to fight for basic principles of religious freedom and conscience, private enterprise, and free association. That's a conservative record?
Look up his similar record on religion, free association, and adoption policy. The man doesn't actually stand for anything.
In Massachusetts, the Attorney General is the only one with standing to represent the government before the courts.
Romney could scream about wanting to do so, but he could not actually do so. If the AG wouldn’t go fight it, Romney could do nothing about it.
As to what people were “surprised” at, there was a hard fight waged to get the religious exception INTO the new law. It was only when that FAILED that the Romney administration came up with the novel legal argument that the old law had not actually been superceded. If that were the case, nobody would have been fighting to get it into the existing law.
Eventually, reality caught up, and Romney was required by law to issue regulations based on the new law.
BTW, unlike the gay marriage case, there are actual real legal scholars who disagree with Romney on this, so my discussion is based on the preponderance of the legal views, not all of them. In fact, there was a lawsuit filed to overturn this ruling. So far, the ruling stands, and so far as I can tell the lawsuit will fail — which would indicate that the legal position taken by the AG was sadly correct.
BTW, I don’t support a blanket religious exception for religions which run public facilities as part of a care system where people don’t have a choice of what facility they are taken to.
To use an extreme example, I’d be rather upset if I needed an emergency blood transfusion but was transported to a hospital run by a religious organization that wouldn’t give me blood because of their “religious beliefs”. Of course, we would all agree about that, because we all think a religious objection to blood transfusions sound silly.
The constitution’s protection allowing you to freely exercise your religion does not give you blanket ability to force those views on others. The legislature could have kpet the exemption, but I don’t believe the constitution required it, and so I don’t believe a suit on that aspect would be successful either.
Given that a significant part of the pro-life community isn’t in agreement about plan b to begin with, I find this particular incident rather minor in the grand scheme of things.
I do wish he had been able to, or would have, fought that more than he did, but it just doesn’t get me worked up like it gets some people.
Plan B at worst only sometimes prevents the implantation of an already fertilized egg. It also prevents pregnancy. Of course, the Catholic church is opposed to birth control, but many pro-lifers are not. For them, if you could prevent a woman from getting pregnant as a result of rape, they would support that, especially if the alternative is the woman has an abortion 4 weeks later.
BTW, many of our “pro-life” candidates support abortion for rape, so for them the plan-b action would likely stir no opposition — if you are for aborting a baby in the case of rape, you certainly won’t oppose giving a pill that might prevent a rape pregnancy.