Mitt Romney’s high school classmates from the prestigious Cranbrook School detail the Republican presidential candidate’s chilling, anti-gay bullying in a Washington Post exposé. The Post independently interviewed multiple students about specific events who each remembered Romney being particularly cruel to students he perceived to be gay.
In one incident recounted by multiple witnesses, after teasing a gay student about his hair for a week, Romney attacked him, holding him down on the ground to cut his hair off while the boy cried for help.
He [Romney] 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.
Others remember Romney being particularly cruel to another gay student, refusing to allow him to speak in class.
But Friedemann and several people closest to Romney in those formative years say there was a sharp edge to him. In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.
I think that I can hardly be accused of hyperbole here when I say that these incidents – tormenting a gay student every single time he tried to speak in class or holding a crying student down and chopping his hair off – these are literally the types of things that LGBT students today kill themselves over. We report suicides because of bullies exactly like Romney over and over again these days.
Jason Horowitz may be willing to attribute Romney’s anti-gay bullying at least in part to the decade we was educated in, but what of his personal character? How much of Romney’s anti-gay bullying can be attributed to the fact that he was plainly an anti-gay bully in high school who made daily life hell for his LGBT classmates?
Better yet, answer me this: How many former presidents of the United States do you think tackled their gay classmates and publicly humiliated them? Did George Washington ever bully gay students? Did FDR make it a point to emasculate his peers in class? Did Obama ever cut someone’s hair off while they cried for help?
This is your presidential nominee, Republicans.
*UPDATE: Romney is saying he “doesn’t remember doing that,” but not denying it. Which is total Republican code for FML.
Source! Sorry for forgetting it, mods!
Update: Romney "apologizes" for those silly little schoolboy pranks.
There are no words for this degree of fail. Just no words.
Considering that many far-right Christians keep arguing that bullying gays and lesbians is a "Christian right" protected by the constitution (or whatever the fuck they're saying, because how dare you silence my hateful beliefs about anybody who isn't straight, white, etc. etc.), this is what they want.
This is exactly the type of hateful, nasty president they want, because most of these people are bullies themselves. They'll read this, identify with it, and immediately have found memories of not only their bullying, but wishing they'd gone as far.
Romney and previous Santorum supporters will eat this shit up like chocolate cake.
"Jason Horowitz may be willing to attribute Romney’s anti-gay bullying at least in part to the decade he was educated in..."
Bullshit. This is no fucking excuse to degrade, harass, and humiliate a person simply because they are attracted to someone of the same gender.
My aunt is a lesbian (she came out after college but was always "butch") and she was bullied horribly as a kid. My mom actually beat the shit out of some kid who was twice her size because he wouldn't leave my aunt alone. If such bullying was totally normal, I doubt my mom would have done anything.
I don't know but I bet you they're looking for accounts right now to post!
Jason Horowitz may be willing to attribute Romney’s anti-gay bullying at least in part to the decade we was educated in, but what of his personal character?
He might be willing to do that but I sure as hell don't. Fucking piece of shit. At some point, no matter what you're taught, you make that conscious decision to fucking do that to another human being. It doesn't matter how much you've been socialized to dehumanize another person. In that moment you look at another person, who you interact with, who you see doing utterly normal, mundane things, and decide to deny their humanity.
Romney, people like you are the reason my friends talk about their pasts and mention suicide with this hollow-eyed mediocrity. Because for us our daily lives can be a struggle to just get through the fucking day. Hope that the bullies and abusers who taunt us for how we dress and speak and act and think and feel and love won't be as cruel as they were yesterday. Hope that when we get home we can avoid parents and siblings who try to harass and abuse and beat the queer out of us. Hope that we can find that one bit of solace, in books or friends, online or in our heads, that place where even if we can't accept ourselves, we can find a bit of peace. Hope desperately that our little bit of peace doesn't go away, because when it does we're left facing that deep, dark pit, that other place that stretches out to eternity.
You're still that fucking bully. In suit and tie you still tell us that we're less than, you would still chase us down a hall and instead of cutting hair you've found a new tool to humiliate and oppress us. Hiding in scripture and family values you try and wave off your hate as something harmless, no longer a schoolboy 'prank' but a defence of the love and liberty that you deny us everyday. I cannot wait for the day when we can look back and this will just be history, those of us left can tell of our pasts, of the things that we had to endure and survive because of bullies like you. I can't wait for that day, even as I know that whatever victory I might feel, it will always be tempered and tainted by the memories of all of those we had to lose because you were just making a joke.
Apparently, he does remember whom he bullied but excused it as it was just another bout of 'hijinks and pranks'.
Fuck him. Fuck his supporters. Fuck that school and all the teachers who did JACKSHIT for those poor kids.
And I don't even know what "American Values" means any more, outside of a bullshit buzz word.
And his insistence that since the individuals he bullied where closeted at the time he couldn't have known they were gay and therefore is not an intolerant homophobe is just all kinds of wrong. Don't tell me you didn't think they were gay or that you weren't bullying them for not meeting your standards of masculinity, because that's exactly what you were doing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit
There's a lot of people who were educated at the same time as Romney, and some of them are straight and cis and yet still managed not to assault classmates for being gay. This ~Oh it was the 1950s or whatever~ bullshit is no excuse for being a fucking bully. Sixty years from now the people who bullied Jamey Rodemeyer and Seth Walsh and Asher Brown and Justin Aaberg and Carl Walker-Hoover and Ryan Halligan and Billy Lucas and Jamie Hubley might use this same excuse, and it will still be disgusting cowardly bullshit just like it is now.
This man is a whole new level of asshole. We need a new word for him and his ilk.
You do it like this: "I was wrong. I'm very sorry."
You do NOT do it like this: "Since a bunch of people are confirming this happened I can't flat out deny it so I'll say I don't remember it but even if it did happen it was just lighthearted schoolboy hijinks OMG can't you people take a joke?"
Also, why do people associate Romney with Christian values? Mormonisn is only as Christian, as Christianity is Jewish. (Btw, Christian, Mormon, Jewish whatever...I don't care. I'm neither of those. The inaccuracy gets to me!).
Fuck. Off.
If some kid held down my child and cut off his hair ... that kid and his family would be in for a very, very unpleasant surprise.
My feelings on Romney have moved from "oh, give me a break" to "you're a fucking disgusting excuse for a human being".
Edited at 2012-05-10 07:24 pm (UTC)
While I can't speak to these presidents, considering the colorful (or colorless -- white male) history of our nation's leadership, I wouldn't be too quick to count out winners like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.
Umm, probably? And he, you know, OWNED other people. Everyone's a product of their time, to some extent. This whole thing, while unfortunate then, is irrelevant now.