Touche!
You see, I don’t believe Mitt Romney’s 2004 pro-life “conversion” was sincere. I believe that it was politically motivated and calculated. It’s not that I hate the man or hate members of the Mormon cult, it is just that I am inherently suspicious of politicians to begin with, especially ones that flip-flop as often as Mitt Romney does.
I find it very hard to believe that after spending most of his political career being “personally pro-choice” (and doing such a good job publicly defending “pro-choice”) that he suddenly became aware of the “science of life” only in 2004. That’s the type of ignorance that strikes me as either grossly incompetent (especially considering the office he is running for now) or politically motivated. And while he may genuinely not have been educated on the issue up until 2004, I find that hard to believe given his public statements on abortion up until 2004.
I find his “conversion” even harder to swallow given his public actions since 2004, one of the most glaring examples of which was the 2005 flip-flop on the question of whether or not Catholic Hospitals in Massachusetts should be forced to administer the Morning After Pill. You remember that one don’t you, estesbob? It happened AFTER Romney’s conversion, it demonstrated his lack of courage and trustworthiness on the issue, and it prefigured the current problems we face with Obamacare. In case you forgot about Romney’s 2005 Morning After Flip-Flop, here is what happened:
In July, 2005, Romney vetoed a proposed state law to make the Morning After Pill available to rape victims treated at Massachusetts hospitals, including private hospitals. Great, right. Immediately, pro-choice groups attacked Romney. Romney responded to them and justified his veto by insisting that during his gubernatorial campaign he promised not to change the state’s abortion laws (remember this for later), and this one did, and therefore he vetoed it. The Legislature then overrode Romney’s veto. The law, as passed over Romney’s veto, required all hospitals to dispense the pill to rape victims - no exceptions for Catholic hospitals. So it looked like at this point that the pro-abortion Legislature had won. The only problem for the pro-abortion Legislature, was that in December 2005, Romney’s public health commissioner determined that a preexisting statute saying private hospitals could not be forced to provide abortions or contraception gave Catholics and other privately run hospitals the right to opt-out of the new law on religious or moral grounds. That law gave Romney a major loophole to exploit, and many now believed that this ruling by Romney’s public health commisssioner would turn the tables back against the new law of the pro-choice Legislature. But what happened next would become a common theme with Romney: he Flip-Flopped under widespread criticism, including some from his own lieutenant governor, and days later Romney reversed course. Romney directed his Department of Public Health to scrap the old rules that exempted the Catholic institutions from the the new law, writing: “I have instructed the Department of Public Health to follow the conclusion of my own legal counsel and to adopt that sounder view.”
I think C.J. Doyle, the executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, summed up Romney best when he said, “the initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama Administration but from the Romney administration…President Obama’s plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics, but I’m not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this.”