Mitt Romney is just frustrating the hell out of me these days. The part of me that craves a two-party system, with the possibility of having more than one option in a presidential election, gets all excited when he appears in a debate and says things like, “not that we want to discriminate against people or to suggest that gay couples are not just as loving and can’t also raise children well.”
Whoa! Yes, baby! The Republican presumptive nominee publicly acknowledges our relationships can actually be based in love, and that we don’t automatically destroy the children we raise. This, sadly, can be considered progress. But then he gives us this:
“But it’s instead a recognition that, for society as a whole, that the nation presumably would be better off if children are raised in a setting where there’s a male and a female. And there are many cases where there’s not possible: divorce, death, single parents, gay parents, and so forth. But for a society to say we want to encourage, through the benefits that we associate with marriage, people to form partnerships between men and women and then raise children, which we think will — that will be the ideal setting for them to be raised.”