Stop pandering, Romney: The religious right may be anti-gay, but GOP voters aren’t

By David Lampo, WashPost, Published: May 4

The resignation of Richard Grenell, the recently appointed and openly gay foreign policy spokesman for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, was as sudden as it was shocking. It was also yet another disturbing sign that the Romney campaign is still in pander mode when it comes to the anti-gay right.

Which is exactly the wrong direction for the presumptive GOP nominee to be moving in. Because according to a wide variety of poll data, Republican voters, unlike most of the politicians vying for their support, largely support gay rights.

When Grenell’s appointment was announced last month, most observers took it as a sign that Romney was starting to move to the center to win moderate and independent voters in November, a welcome change after a Republican primary process often dominated by religious-right candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.

But the shift to the middle, a smart and necessary political play for Romney, didn’t last long. Even though Grenell had previously served as a spokesman at the United Nations for President George W. Bush and then-Ambassador John R. Bolton, a darling of most conservatives, from the moment he was appointed to the Romney campaign, he was vilified for his sexual orientation — irrelevant, of course, to the policy area for which he was chosen.

(More here.)