Gay leaders slam Romney in ‘Gets Worse’ campaign

Two liberal PACs are funding Mitt Gets Worse a website featuring video testimony from LGBT civil rights advocates saying the candidate’s LGBT record has deteriorated.

The funders American Bridge 21st Century and Courage Campaign Super PAC.

The site’s name is a play on the popular and positive It Gets Better campaign to inform young LGBTs that, whatever they’re dealing with, “it gets better.” Romney, earlier this summer, was said to have bulled gay kids at school.

The home page at MittGetsWorse.org says, “Welcome to the Mitt Gets Worse Project! American Bridge 21st Century and Courage Campaign Super PAC have partnered to launch this oral history project and rapid response campaign that aims to educate voters about Mitt Romney’s extreme anti-LGBT agenda.

“Romney has earned a reputation as a flip-flopper — changing his positions in whatever direction advances his career. But when it comes to LGBT issues, there’s one thing you can always count on: Mitt Gets Worse.” The PACs say year after year Romney moves right.

In the weeks before the Republican National Convention in Tampa, the Mitt Gets Worse campaign will be posting first-person accounts – video testimonials – from LGBT civil rights advocates.

The site already contains testimony from:

• Jennifer Chrisler, the executive director of the Family Equality Council, a national group that fought for marriage equality in Massachusetts, where Romney was governor.

• Julie Goodridge, the lead plaintiff in the marriage equality case that led to Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage. She describes her meeting with Romney as “the most frustrating experience in the entire marriage case.”

• Kathleen Henry, chair of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, who recalls that Romney’s chief of staff told her in 2006 that the governor was rescinding an executive order creating the commission because it included transgender and bisexual youth.

• Adam Bink, director of the Courage Campaign, who helped organizing a grassroots campaign to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment intended to ban same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Bink said Romney has “thrown LGBT people in Massachusetts under the bus and he’d do the same for the rest of America if elected “president.”

He added, in a statement, “Mitt Romney said in 1994 that he’d be better for gay rights than Sen. Ted Kennedy. But Mitt got worse, radically changing his positions. Can anyone trust Mitt Romney if he says one thing and does another to the people of his own state? Our message to voters is simple: if Romney’s flip-flopped on these basic issues of fairness, he can’t be trusted to keep his word on the other issues that matter.”

On the Web: http://mittgetsworse.org/category/videos/

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