GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Orlando, Fla. (Pic by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr)
The National Stonewall Democrats, the “national voice of LGBT Democrats” have launched a campaign urging gay and lesbian Republicans to not support “anti-LGBT GOP presidential candidates.”
The Stonewall statement says: “In recent media reports, the leaders and members of Log Cabin Republicans have indicated a willingness to endorse Mitt Romney should he become the nominee, yet Romney – just like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich – signed a draconian anti-LGBT pledge written by a certified hate group.”
The National Organization for Marriage describes its pledge here:
As the election season heats up, all eyes will be turned on the GOP presidential race. Will the candidate who goes on to challenge Barack Obama be someone who firmly believes in protecting marriage? That’s what the NOM Marriage Pledge is designed to do—publicly commit Republican presidential candidates to pursuing five critical goals to protect marriage.
Log Cabin Republicans deputy executive director Christian Berle tells The Florida Independent the group has not endorsed a GOP presidential candidate, because, he says the group’s “practice has been to wait until there is a nominee for president, and often make a decision to endorse or not endorse around the Republican National Convention.”
Berle adss that “several of our members at a chapter event in Miami chose to support Gov. Romney in a straw poll. I don’t know how that is a decision of our national board of directors. We have members who are supporting any number of candidates, but as a national organization we have not endorsed a candidate.”
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida endorsed Romney, and is the first Republican to co-sponsor the Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.
“My only assumption is that Stonewall is doing this to attract more attention to themselves,” and to “obfuscate over the fact that their endorsed candidate, the president of United States, doesn’t support marriage equality,” Berle says.
Berle adds that Log Cabin Republicans 100 percent believe in the “fundamental freedom to marry for all Americans” and that they “oppose” National Organization for Marriage pledge.
According to the National Organization for Marriage, Romney, Gingrich and Santorum “have distinguished themselves as marriage champions by signing the [National Organization for Marriage] pledge to voters.”
The pledge calls for ”a federal marriage amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the states for ratification,” and for a vigorous defense of the “Defense of Marriage Act.”
The pledge also calls for “a presidential commission on religious liberty to investigate and document reports of Americans who have been harassed or threatened for exercising key civil rights to organize, to speak, to donate or to vote for marriage and to propose new protections, if needed.”
The organization calls GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, who has not signed the pledge, a “radical that would destroy traditional marriage in America.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center writes that Robert George, one of the founders of the National Organization for Marriage, “co-authored the 2009 ‘Manhattan Declaration,’ a manifesto developed after a New York meeting of conservative church leaders that ‘promises resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same sex marriage.’”
