Teenage Mitt Romney assaulted a classmate in high school for being gay

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(Matthew Reichbach) One day after President Obama announced his support for marriage equality, the Washington Post reports on the early days of Mitt Romney's evolution on equal rights:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn't having it.

'He can't look like that. That's wrong. Just look at him!' an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann's recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber's look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school's collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber's hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. [...]

'It was a hack job,' recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. 'It was vicious.'

Some 30 years later, Lauber'who died in 2004'told one of the witnesses to the assault that:

It was horrible ... It's something I have thought about a lot since then.

So, all these years later, is Mitt Romney sorry for assaulting a classmate? Or is he trying to dismiss it as a youthful indiscretion? Nope. According to his campaign:

... the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident.

How convenient.

7:44 AM PT: If?

Romney on WAPO piece on pranks: "Back in high school I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended by that I apologize"

' @EmilyABC via Seesmic

[Discussion is also underway in a recommended diary by Rolling Snake Ball].