Boston Spirit magazine has dug a bit deeper into Mitt Romney’s past interactions with LGBT people, particularly during his time as governor. Many of these stories are known: his firing of two state employees ostensibly for marrying their same-sex partners, his dissolution of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth,  his blocking of an anti-bullying guide because it contained the words “bisexual” and “transgender,” and his testimony against marriage equality to the Senate Judiciary Committee after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled the state’s ban was unconstitutional. But this new profile illustrates a more profound level of insensitivity to the experience of LGBT people than his past position statements suggest.

David Wilson and Julie Goodridge, two of the plaintiffs whose case led to the legalization of marriage equality in Massachusetts, described meeting with Romney to discuss their experiences. According to Wilson, “it was like talking to a robot. No expression, no feeling.” At one point, Romney remarked, “I didn’t know you had families.” Goodridge recalls her final exchange with the governor, which proved to her that he had “no capacity for empathy”:

GOODRIDGE: Governor Romney, tell me — what would you suggest I say to my 8 year-old daughter about why her mommy and her ma can’t get married because you, the governor of her state, are going to block our marriage?

ROMNEY: I don’t really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don’t you just tell her the same thing you’ve been telling her the last eight years.

Romney described the meeting to the press as “pleasant,” as Goodridge cried.

This lack of understanding for the experience of same-sex families seems to have played out even on the occasions in which he was open to supporting LGBT protections. Josh Friedes, who once served as advocacy director for the Massachusetts Freedom to Marry Coalition, explained Romney’s business-informed rationale:

FRIEDES: He made clear that he was willing to listen to business leaders about the issue of family recognition. The impression was that if business leaders told him certain benefits and protections would increase the productivity of gay workers, he would be open to supporting those. … It was not really about what these protections would do for gay families, but what they would do for the titans of industry… It felt like there was a lord/serf relationship.

Ardith Wieworka knows she cannot prove that she was fired as the state’s Office of Child Care Services just because she was going to marry her same-sex partner, but she remembers what Romney’s administration told her when they fired her: they wanted someone more “like them.”

Values Voters Summit Confirmed and Invited Speakers

Several prominent social justice groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, and National Council of La Raza, have sent a letter discouraging public officials from participating in the Family Research Council’s Values Voters Summit this weekend. Among the confirmed speakers are vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), and Ann Romney, among many other prominent Republican lawmakers and conservative voices.

The letter highlights FRC’s anti-gay smears, as well as that of affiliate American Family Association, both groups the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed “hate groups:

The FRC is far outside of the mainstream. It has engaged in repeated, groundless demonization — portraying LGBT people as sick, vile, incestuous, violent, perverted, and a danger to the nation. One of its officials has gone so far as to say homosexuality should be criminalized. [...]

We urge you to decline the FRC’s invitation and not share the stage with and lend your credibility to an organization that spreads demonizing falsehoods about other people.

The letter may not deter any of these speakers, but it does hold them accountable for their affiliation. The speakers’ rhetoric will likely cater to the social conservative base, but their mere presence at the conference will speak volumes to the general public.

Linda Harvey

The hate group Mission: America has released a new guide for talking to kids about homosexuality. In it, Linda Harvey glosses over Bible verses — when the mob attempted to gang-rape the angels in Sodom, they “made life very hard for people in their community” — as she teaches kids that being gay is “sin” and “it’s always wrong”:

But once in a while, a man wants to date and love another man, or a woman wants to date and love a woman. Most cultures long ago decided this was very wrong. And they made rules against it, for a lot of good reasons (more grown-up stuff). First of all, two men can never create their own child. Neither can two women. And two men kissing– well, it just doesn’t seem right. That’s because it isn’t!

She goes on to explain that bullying is also “always wrong,” but so is telling people that being gay or transgender is okay:

BUT… it’s not right to tell someone that being homosexual is okay. The person may be feeling sad because of being bullied, but never try to make him or [sic] feel better by saying “gay” is okay.

Kids who are overweight are sometimes bullied, too. And we might want to make that person feel better. But it would be a mistake to say that overeating is a good thing, right? So tell your friends, in a nice way, that no one needs to be “gay” or pretend to be the other gender. It’s not the right thing to do.

Harvey is directly encouraging young people to bully their LGBT peers. She rejects the notion that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate, core identities as social science has repeatedly explained. That “grown-up stuff” gets in the way of the Biblical condemnations she wants to proliferate in schools. Rates of anti-LGBT bullying are already high; according to GLSEN’s latest school climate survey, 82 percent of students reported being verbally harassed for their sexual orientation. Truth Wins Out once described Linda Harvey as “the most homophobic woman in America,” and her latest publication proves the point.

Knoxville teacher James Yoakley.

In May, the Lenoir City High School faculty was threatened with a criminal investigation for publishing a yearbook story titled, “It’s OK To Be Gay.” The student newspaper at the same Knoxville, Tennessee school was barred from publishing a piece by an atheist student explaining her lack of beliefs, which was later released in a local paper. What these two pieces have in common are teacher James Yoakley, who supported the publication of both articles as an English teacher and yearbook adviser.

This year, he was mysteriously transferred to a new job. He explained to Metro Pulse the fallout from the Yearbook incident and why he thinks he’s no longer in his previous position:

YOAKLEY: When the principal suggested I resign, I was fairly sure it wasn’t his idea. I refused but certainly thought about leaving. I spent the summer exploring other opportunities but decided to stay because I knew they wanted me to leave. The transfer to the middle school was, in my opinion, a punishment designed to make me want to leave. It’s funny how much I love teaching there.

Yoakley’s principal told him he was “improperly influencing” students, and the transfer happened just three weeks after he refused to resign. As part of the change, he was removed from his yearbook adviser post, which was worth $5,000. To put that loss in perspective, the median salary for a Knoxville public school teacher is around $45,000, meaning Yoakley was docked around 11 percent of a typical salary for supporting a student’s right to speak freely about his sexual orientation or religious views.

While this sort of abuse is sadly familiar to LGBT Americans, discrimination against atheists is less well known. However, it’s also shockingly widespread. Polling data consistently shows that atheists face enormous hurdles to get access to public office and, recently, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) blamed the horrific shooting in Aurora, Colorado on non-theistic Americans.