Last week, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney hired Richard Grenell, an openly gay Republican who served as President George W. Bush’s United Nations spokesman, to be his spokesman on foreign policy.
The majority of the media coverage about the hiring was positive.
The Atlantic’s Molly Ball made a case Tuesday that the addition of Grenell to Team Romney is a watershed moment for Republican Party politics.
“The recent hiring of Richard Grenell, Mitt Romney’s openly gay foreign-policy spokesman, represents a breakthrough in the world of Republican presidential campaigns. As an openly gay Republican in presidential politics, Grenell joins a small fraternity of out GOP staffers, instantly becoming the highest-profile of the band. His rise signals a remarkable new openness in a party often castigated for its social conservatism; in addition to being out, Grenell has waged some public battles for gay rights that contradict his new boss’s own positions.”
But most outlets said little or nothing about the hire until after the fact — and only after the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer attacked Romney for the new hire.
“This has all the appearances of a deliberate poke in the eye to the pro-family community, and a clumsy one at that,” Fischer wrote, “coming right on the heels of endorsements from Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas and the National Organization for Marriage, and right after the governor accepted an invitation to deliver the commencement address at Liberty University.”
BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith summarized Fischer’s inflammatory rhetoric in an article published Saturday: “Bryan Fischer, the director of issue analysis for the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association, is probably the most straightforwardly anti-gay Republican to appear regularly in the party’s mainstream. He responded yesterday to Romney’s decision to hire an openly-gay Richard Grenell by calling it a ‘message to the pro-family community’
This article originally appeared on: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865554800/Mitt-Romneys-hire-of-gay-spokesman-derided-defended.html