Under pressure from conservatives, openly gay Romney adviser resigns

Party ponders positively prehistoric prejudices From Jennifer Rubin, who appears to exist at the Washington Post only for the purpose of flattering Mitt Romney on a daily basis, comes a bit of remarkable news:

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives. [...]

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president's ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

This is a bit of a big deal. Many Republicans have staffers, strategists, etc., who are gay; it isn't often made into an actual issue, so long as they keep their mouths shut and don't say anything that would embarrass their anti-gay boss during one of his efforts to pass legislation that would make their lives worse. But this is a case where conservatives outside the Romney campaign actively attacked the staffer solely for being gay, deeming him untrustworthy merely for that fact:

In the National Review, Matthew J. Franck wrote late last week: 'Suppose Barack Obama comes out ' as Grenell wishes he would ' in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?'

Got that? Openly gay = probable turncoat. That's the argument against him. Grenell was no small fry, either; he had been appointed by George W. Bush to work at the U.N. under John Bolton, so his conservative credentials would seem solid enough. Nevertheless, Republican bigotries have blossomed enough over the last few years that even he was not considered "pure" enough.

No matter how bad it gets, it seems there's still no bottom to this new, more aggressively bigoted and retrograde conservatism. First they purged any Republican who had been suspected of compromising with Democrats; now they're going down to the staff level, purging unfavorables from even those ranks. It's a hell of a thing.

For further discussion, see zenbassoon's diary