While he may have been silent during the entire debt-ceiling debacle, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been very vocal about his support of a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Romney took that support even further and signed a pledge sponsored by the National Organization for Marriage promising future support.
At first blush such an act may seem purely symbolic. But the pledge pushed by NOM goes much further than simply promising to push amending the Constitution. It includes a promise to establish a presidential commission on “religious liberty” whose sole purpose is to investigate alleged harassment of opponents of same-sex marriage and to nominate federal judges who “reject the idea that our Founding Fathers inserted a right to gay marriage into our Constitution.”
Other Republican candidates including Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann signed the pledge as well. Tim Pawlenty refused the pledge, preferring to express his “commitment to the institution of marriage” in his own words.
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Two Republicans intend to publicly call for anti-gay-marriage activist Bob Vander Plaats to “answer questions about his campaign to politicize Iowa’s judicial system,” according to a news release.
Last year, former Speaker Newt Gingrich offered his vocal support for the ultimately successful campaign to oust three of the nine Iowa Supreme Court justices who had unanimously ruled in favor of marriage equality. As Gingrich courts social conservativeswhile exploring a possible presidential bid, new disclosures from his camp indicate that he and his associates bankrolled more than one-third of the $850,000 campaign to remove the Iowa justices.
Of course there was out-of-state money flowing into groups like Iowa for Freedom, which, along with David Vander Plaats, led the campaign to vote out three of Iowa’s seven State Supreme Court justices who voted unanimously to legalize same-sex marriage there. And from whose bank account?
