With all the talk over Mitt Romney’s bullying of a presumed gay classmate, some have questioned whether it’s fair to judge someone on their actions in high school. But everyone agrees that anything from a recent political career is fair game.

So it’s telling that one doesn’t have to reach that far back to find other incidents of LGBT bullying from Romney’s close staff. Romney campaign senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom (of Etch-a-Sketch fame) outed a transgender woman in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, effectively ending her political career, when he was a reporter for the Boston Herald.

America Blog reminds us of the incident, relayed in a GQ profile, which tells of Fernhstrom’s apparent “glee” when he found the representative’s birth certificate:

Fehrnstrom saved his cheap shots for smaller-time Massachusetts pols. When a political activist and gadfly named Althea Garrison was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the fact that she was transgender was an open secret in Boston political circles. But Fehrnstrom was the first one to put that information into print—”I can remember his glee when he found the birth certificate,” says former Herald reporter Robert Connolly—thus bringing a swift end to Garrison’s future on Beacon Hill.

Romney himself also abolished a commission working against LGBT bullying in Massachusetts as governor.

Eric Fehrnstrom (L) and Ric Grenell

When a CNN anchor asked campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom about Grenell, the top aide prefaced his remarks by saying: “First let me correct you. He wasn’t two weeks on the job. He was scheduled to start on May 1.” Other Romney-friendly media, vaguely sourcing the campaign, addressed Grenell’s departure the same way, implying that he left the job before he’d started it. When the Washington Post reported that Grenell was “kept under wraps,” Washington Examiner’s Byron York pushed back:

But Romney campaign officials say strongly that they did not keep Grenell under wraps or in any other way discourage him from taking the job. First, they point out that at the time (last week) in which Grenell was supposedly being held back, he was not yet an employee of the Romney campaign. Like a number of other new hires, officials say, Grenell was getting ready to move to Boston to begin work May 1. Romney officials fully anticipated he would begin his public role as spokesman then.

The only problem? Grenell could well have been set to officially become an employee of the Romney campaign on May 1, but he’d already started working for the team.

As Andrew Sullivan reported last night and the New York Times later confirmed, Grenell helped organize a Romney campaign conference call to pre-empt Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy speech last week. Sullivan reported that after Grenell’s voice was not heard on the April 26 call, which he’d helped set up, people started to ask questions:

Some even called and questioned him afterwards as to why he was absent. He wasn’t absent. He was simply muzzled. For a job where you are supposed to maintain good relations with reporters, being silenced on a key conference call on your area of expertise is pretty damaging. Especially when you helped set it up.

Sources close to Grenell say that he was specifically told by those high up in the Romney campaign to stay silent on the call, even while he was on it. And this was not the only time he had been instructed to shut up.

The Times added information to Sullivan’s story, also noting that the call was the “biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team”:

It turned out [Grenell] was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

It’s no wonder Grenell felt the need to resign from the campaign. The newly revealed information only bolsters his reasons: the campaign was clearly seeking to mislead the media to downplay Grenell’s departure. “It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” an anonymous Republican told the Times. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.” If Romney campaign can’t stand up to a bigoted special interest on personnel issues — for what they clearly thought was the best man for the job — how could a Romney administration be expected to make the politically tough decisions needed to successfully govern the country?

Richard Grenell

Instead, in a response that closely resembled the GOP’s reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” controversy, Fehrnstrom found false equivalency between “voices of intolerance” in both political parties and fell short of crisply defending gay Republicans from the claim that they’ll impose a “homosexual agenda” that is contrary to “family values”:

ERIN BURNETT (CNN HOST): He said, “my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyperpartisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign.” Obviously it sounds there, reading between the lines, that the focus on his personal decisions, on perhaps his sexuality, was why he chose to go. Maybe not because it was happening in your campaign, but it was happening by others in the Republican party?

FEHRNSTROM: Yeah, and that’s disappointing. Wherever there are voices of intolerance within the party or the Democratic party for that matter, it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from, it’s disappointing. And the governor has taken the opportunity in the past to denounce those voices of intolerance…. [W]e do not take into consideration non-factors like race or ethnicity or sexual orientation. We look for the best possible people to do the job.

Watch it:

Romney failure to take the opportunity to denounce social conservative critics in the aftermath of Grenell’s appointment and his decision to keep the spokesperson under wraps during the anniversary of the Bin Laden capture, likely contributed to his decision to resign. As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin reported, Grenell was upset that there was no public statement of support for him “by the campaign and no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters.” An aide confirmed the campaign’s resistance to engage with conservatives to the New York Times. “It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” one Republican adviser said. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.”

That silence also allowed social conservatives to take a victory lap following the resignation. The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer — who had led the charge against Grenell’s appointment, attacking him for being a “homosexual activist” whose behavior is “offensive to God” — declared a “huge win” and noted, “There is no way in the world that Mitt Romney is going to put a homosexual activist in any position of importance in his campaign.”