Adam B Sullivan

Mitt Romney’s new spokesman is gay and it doesn’t seem to have been a big deal.

A few people have patted Romney on the back for hiring Richard Grenell (The Atlantic called it a milestone) and a few took jabs (the National Review said Grenell’s work on gay marriage shows he has “questionable judgement“), but for the most part, there was no widespread conservative outcry about Grenell being on board.

Bill Scher at Blogging Heads wonders if the lack of outrage is indicative of a newly accepting GOP:

“Is it a new day for gay conservatives? It wasn’t all that long ago that one of Bush’s top aides, Ken Mehlman, stayed in the closet … You could argue [Romey] has made this hire and it has not caused a revolt on the right.”

While I do think gay issues will eventually drop from the GOP’s radar, Grenell’s hiring and the reaction to it is not evidence thereof.

The reason there was no revolt when Romney hired a gay staffer is because in order to revolt, one has to already be part of the entity being revolted against. That is, the Republicans who staunchly oppose gay rights (and homosexuality in general) are not in the Romney camp. They’re disillusioned that a social conservative isn’t going to win the nomination and they’re still mulling whether they’ll go to the polls in November at all. These Republicans already see Romney as liberal on social issues (rightfully so, probably) so they don’t have any reason to get worked up when he reinforces that.

Some student tickets to President Obama’s visit to the University of Iowa this week feature a possibly confusing typo.

The president’s speech about student aid is set to start shortly after 1 p.m. on Wednesday. However, some tickets tell attendees that doors will open at 10 p.m. — several hours after the president will have left the state.

I spotted two Facebook friends posting pictures of their tickets. One was correct and the other was incorrect.

For anyone going to the event, doors indeed open at 10 a.m., not 10 p.m.

Western Iowa daily newspaper Sioux City Journal devoted its whole Sunday front page to an anti-bullying editorial after a gay teen killed himself last week.
14-year-old Kenneth Weishuhn reportedly received threats from classmates and was the target of a hateful Facebook group after friends at school found out he was gay. Weisuhn’s sister says that’s what lead the teenager to kill himself.

The Sioux City Journal is using the case to call for people to step in to stop bullying:

This is not a failure of one group of kids, one school, one town, one county or one geographic area. Rather, it exposes a fundamental flaw in our society, one that has deep-seated roots. Until now, it has been too difficult, inconvenient — maybe even painful — to address. But we can’t keep looking away.

In Kenneth’s case, the warnings were everywhere. We saw it happen in other communities, now it has hit home. Undoubtedly, it wasn’t the first life lost to bullying here, but we can strive to make it the last.

I’ve emailed the managing editor and opinions editor at the Journal about their decisions to put the editorial on the front. I’ll post comments when I hear back from them.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson says he supports limited military involvement abroad, but he says that doesn’t make him an interventionist.

Johnson has caught heat for comments he made to the Daily Caller earlier this month about when the president ought to employ military forces, saying he’s open to keeping bases open in Afghanistan and supports efforts to capture African bad guy Joseph Kony. That lead Reason to question whether Johnson’s foreign policy was libertarian at all.

But in an interview this morning, Johnson told me he wasn’t communicating well during the Daily Caller and that what he really meant is that he wants to make sure the U.S. isn’t isolating itself.

“I am a non-interventionist. I don’t want to intervene anywhere, but I want to draw a disticiton betwteen non-intervention and isolationism. I don’t want to be isolated. I don’t want to involve ourselves millitarily, but in the same breath we should be vigilint to what may be threats and we should be involved diplomatically,” Johnson said.

On Kony, Johnson said he supported the 2010 legislation signed by President Obama which authorized the U.S. to support efforts to capture the Ugandan military leader. Johnson said he if he were president, he would support efforts to capture Kony.

“In this case, my understanding of him as a bad guy is that he’s the worst guy on the planet. If I were to sign that legislation from Congress, I would’ve asked for a volunteer force to go in and deal with that. This is the kind of thing where I don’t really think we want to stand by and watch something like this happen. It’s my understanding that this has been going on for decades but that they asked for our help. Congress passed and Obama signed legislation I think this is an example of humanitarian involvement,” Johnson said.