It’s standard fare for revelations about a candidate’s past to be leveraged against him. But it’s unfair to draw sweeping conclusions about Romney’s character based on allegations of high-school cruelty. For one thing, it’s hypocritical. The vast majority of high schoolers, as anyone who has attended high school can tell you, are pretty unbearable. They can be mean, stupid, cliquish, insecure. They blame everything on their parents, probe for signs of weakness, badmouth each other. There is no such thing as a human being who did not make bad decisions in high school, whether it involved binge drinking or bullying a weaker kid. That’s not to minimize the pain Romney allegedly caused; as Horowitz shows, the incident haunted both the victim and some of the perpetrators for a very long time. But it’s not necessarily a measure of who he’s become.
It was silly four years ago to argue Barack Obama was unsuited for the presidency because he smoked pot and snorted cocaine once upon a time. It is silly to reach the same conclusion about Romney now. Recreational drug use and adolescent bullying are different; most of the time, the former crime is victimless. But in 1965, homophobia was even more common than it is now. That doesn’t excuse it, yet even today, in what is supposed to be an era of social progress, anti-gay epithets are still flung haphazardly by kids grasping for touchstone insults, including kids who aren’t anti-gay.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member