I'm a teacher, and I will be making the following announcement to all my classes tomorrow:

[Grammy23]

44. A Few Things About the latest "tid bit" we know about Romney

Again, while he is talking about this incident, he chuckles and laughs through the initial remarks he made. Remember when he was interviewed (some time ago, I think) about the dog incident, he chuckles and laughs his way through that, too. He has a really odd idea about what is humorous and how he should handle these things when he is interviewed. I am sure he couldn't anticipate exactly how the latest episode would be handled in the news, but surely his advisors did have a clue and should have suggested he be more sensitive and apologetic about it from the minute he began discussing it-----not after the story hit the fan and he needed to take a more serious tone about it.

And the second thing that stuck me about his comments were that at that time in his life (mid-60s) was that they didn't notice things like whether someone was "gay" or not. And by the way, back then someone assumed to be homosexual was called queer or fag. So no, gay was probably NOT the word that would have been used, but you can bet your ass we sure did know about those things back then. I graduated high school in 1966 and while we didn't have nearly the understanding about this issue that we do now, we certainly knew something about it. And for him to act like we didn't discuss such things was absolute BS. I very well remember a guy in my class who was very small for his age, bleached his hair almost white and wore it in a style that hung down over his forehead----at a time when having longer hair was really controversial. Remember when boys had to have their hair NOT touch the collar?? Schools had rules about this. And they were enforced, too. Anyhow, this classmate had a twin brother who was the exact opposite of him.....big, burly, football player. Very popular guy. While the other one (the bleached hair guy) was thought odd, out of place and DIFFERENT. EVERYONE one of us knew what the difference was even though we didn't talk about it openly.

So for Mr. Romney to pretend that noticing someone's sexual orientation didn't happen back then is so far fetched that it's laughable. Except for this: The issue of Marriage Equality and FAIRNESS to all American citizens is not laughable and is a serious matter to most of the LGBT community and a sizable portion of the straight folks. Some of us have given this a lot of thought and have come to the conclusion that it's time the USA changed it's policies and attitudes to a significant portion of our population. In the future when all of this has been long settled and is in the history books, we will be viewed as very backward for taking so long to do this. I am sure when they look at this period in history it will look just like some of the coverage from the days of the Civil Rights Movement. Video of attack dogs, fire hoses turned on protesters and hateful mobs showing their prejudices. It makes me ashamed to see that even though I was a kid then and my family was on the right side of that argument---and we lived in Jackson, MS at the time.

Long story short, I think all of this tells us a lot about Mr. Romney's character and also a lot about how he handles a sensitive subject. Do we really want a man for our President who thinks he can talk about assaulting someone (even in his youth) and can chuckle and laugh about it, discounting the seriousness of it and delaying an apology until he is forced to do so?