The Herald reports that Mitt Romney, if presented with the wacko abortion bill now pending in South Dakota, would sign it. This is the bill that forbids all abortions except to save the mother’s life. No exception for rape, incest, or the mother’s health. Nice.
And listen to the ridiculous line spouted by Romney’s flack:
Romney spokeswoman Julie Teer said the governor would back a state ban on abortion if, as occurred in South Dakota, lawmakers passed such a measure. “If Gov. Romney were the governor of South Dakota he would sign it,” Teer told political newsletter The Hotline yesterday. “The governor believes that states should have the right to be pro-life if that is the will of the people.”
Ah, so the Governor apparently thinks that if the “will of the people,” as expressed through the people’s elected representatives in the legislature, approve of a measure, it ought to become law. I guess that means that Romney doesn’t believe in using his veto power. Oh, whoops. Wait. No, seriously.
It also appears from the Herald article that Romney is backtracking on his initial response to the Catholic bishops that he lacks the authority to exempt Catholic Charities from state law banning discrimination against gay couples who want to adopt. (An exemption, by the way, that Catholic Charities does not want.) He’s now “looking forward to meeting” with the bishops to discuss their “free practice of religion.” I gave Romney credit for his initial position on this. Obviously, I spoke too soon. My bad – I assumed Romney might actually, every once in a while, take a principled position on something even if it might upset the right flank of his party. Silly me.
Romney has gone off the deep end here, hasn’t he? Does he really think that most Americans support kooky abortion bills like the one in South Dakota? I don’t. By taking such extreme right-wing positions this early on, it seems to me he’s putting an awful lot of eggs in the very basket that may find it most difficult to accept him because of his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. A curious strategy. In any event, the opposition researchers are going to have a ball comparing Romney’s relatively recent views on abortion with the ones he’s spouting now.
UPDATE (3/1): There’s a titillating tidbit in the Globe article about the gay adoption issue: the august Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray (for which I worked several years back), which originally was retained to advise the bishops on how to get out of the state’s anti-discrimination law, has informed the Globe that it “will no longer be doing any more legal work on the gay adoption issue.” What’s fascinating about this is that all law firms, certainly including Ropes & Gray, are notoriously tight-lipped about their clients’ business, and for good reason. So the fact that Ropes & Gray was willing (through an anonymous representative of the firm) to tell the Globe that it was off the case is remarkable. One possibility is that the firm had concluded that whatever strategy the bishops wanted to pursue was not legally viable, and that the bishops didn’t want to hear that answer.
