Republican Senate candidate Sarah Steelman defended today a Tea Party activist’s call to “kill the Claire Bear” — a reference to Sen. Claire McCaskill (R-MO), whom Steelman is running against. Steelman has been under fire this week from Democrats for not denouncing the remark, which came at a Tea Party rally last week that Steelman attended.

“There was nothing violent about what he said…no one perceived it as a threat,” Steeleman told KZRG in Joplin. No one, that is, except for the FBI, which reportedly interviewed the activist who made the comment, Scott Boston, and the Capitol Police, which assigned McCaskill extra protection. Boston later said he did not intend the comment to be a threat.

Steelman, did say that the “kill” comment was a poor choice of words and “a bad joke,” but dismissed the controversy and defended Boston:

STEELMAN: Are we just we just going to abandon all common sense in this country and anytime anybody says anything, the government is just going to come down and send FBI agents to knock on your door? Are we going to have thought and speech police? [...]

This is part of the problem in Washington…and people jump on somebody like Scott Boston, an individual, and they can put the whole force of the federal government on this guy.

The liberal research organization American Bridge recorded the interview:

Steeleman was at the rally with her son, who applauded Boston’s comment. Steelman’s Republican primary opponent John Brunner issued a strong rebuke of Boston’s comment, saying, “This type of rhetoric is unconscionable and I reject this kind of politics.” “Comments like these have no place in this U.S. Senate campaign, or any other campaign in this country, because they don’t represent American values,” the Republican said.

Ed Gillespie, senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, told Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown that the campaign would make President Obama’s support for marriage equality an issue this November and that Romney will actively push for a constitutional amendment to take away the right of states to voluntarily extend marriage equality to same-sex couples.

Gillespie told Todd that same-sex marriage “will be another bright-line difference in this campaign.” He added that the GOP intends to campaign on the issue:

TODD: Will you guys campaign on this, campaign on this issue of marriage?

GILLESPIE: Sure. I think it’s an important issue for people and it engenders strong feelings on both sides. I think it’s important to be respectful in how we talk about our differences, but the fact is that’s a significant difference in November.

Later, Gillespie added that Romney believes a federal marriage constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage “should be enacted.” Watch the video:

Gillespie is no stranger to using same-sex couples as a wedge issue; he served as President George W. Bush’s Republican National Committee Chairman during the 2004 campaign. During that campaign, Republicans pushed for anti-LGBT state constitutional amendments to get out the conservative vote. They also wrote the following into the Party’s official platform: “We strongly support President Bush’s call for a Constitutional amendment that fully protects marriage, and we believe that neither federal nor state judges nor bureaucrats should force states to recognize other living arrangements as equivalent to marriage.”

Popular support for marriage has soared since then — most Americans now support same-sex marriage. The fact that a number of states enacted constitutional amendments back in 2004 has little bearing eight years later.

Romney has played up his pro-discrimination stand throughout this presidential campaign, boasting that he’d fought to take away marriage equality from same-sex couples and that he’d dug up an an obscure 1913 law (originally intended to limit interracial marriage) to keep out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts. “On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage,” Romney told a CPAC Convention in February.