Mitt Romney wishes he could have kept gay spokesman. Just not enough to do anything about it.

Mitt Romney may have muzzled his now ex-spokesman Richard Grenell and let the homophobic right bully him out of his campaign post because he was gay, but Romney and his remaining, apparently non-gay, advisers wants us to know they had no problem with Grenell's sexuality and wanted him to stay. He just, for his own reasons having nothing to do with them not having his back, decided to leave:

'He's a very accomplished spokesperson, and we select people not based upon their ethnicity or their sexual preference or their gender but upon their capability,' Romney said.

The former Massachusetts governor added: 'He expressed a desire to move on and I wish him the very best.'

There's a necessary step after selecting people based upon their capability, Mitt. It's called standing up to pressure from bigots who attack your capable employee for reasons unrelated to his capability or lack thereof. Making a hiring decision without regard to the person's sexuality doesn't advance the cause of equality if you let others unmake your decision because of it.

But if you thought this signaled something about Romney's willingness to indulge bigotry, fear not:

"Wherever there are voices of intolerance within the party, or the Democratic Party for that matter ' it doesn't matter where it's coming from ' it's disappointing," [Romney senior adviser Eric] Fehrnstrom said. "And the governor has taken the opportunity in the past to denounce those voices of intolerance.

Oh, well. That settles things. In the past Romney has denounced intolerance, so we can forget that in the present he let it silence the person he had chosen as the best to carry his foreign policy message.