The sad spectacle being displayed this week by Bain and Company's Mitt Romney over same sex marriage can best be described as craven political opportunism.

Romney spent the day Tuesday dodging reporter's questions about his intention to invoke a racist 1913 state statute to prevent non-residents from such marriages in Massachusetts.

Legal scholars acknowledge the old law was aimed at prohibiting interracial marriages in those dark days before World War I. The offensive law has been ignored for decades, but now Romney's advisers have told him it's still on the books and should be enforced.

The Romney strategy seems designed to propel slick Mitt into the national political discussion, and it's already working: estimable NBC "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert even invoked Romney's name in recent days. And while worldwide media attention focused on the court-ordered legalization of same sex marriage, the man in the corner office was intent on giving solace to the opponents of the court order. In so doing, he has become an enabler for the homophobes among us.

You would expect more from a man of his proclaimed faith. Romney is a leader of the local Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS, the Mormons), and should have empathy for oppressed peoples. It was the Mormons and their leader and founder, Joseph Smith, who in the 19th century were driven from upstate New York across the country through Illinois and on out through the Midwest, finally completing an exodus to Salt Lake City, where they found safety and freedom to practice their religion. There is great irony, too, that Smith and his immediate successors in that religion maintained their own unique view of marriage.

In his insightful 2003 book, Under the Banner of Heaven, author Jon Krakauer cites Mormonism's then-president, prophet, seer and revelator John Taylor as saying in 1880,

"Polygamy is a divine institution. It has been handed down direct from God. The United States cannot abolish it. No nation on earth can prevent it, nor all nations of the earth combined…. I defy the United States; I will obey God."

Although many current-day Mormons are said to disdain the practice of taking many wives, Krakauer points out that numbers of fundamentalist Mormon believers continue to practice polygamy.

It is puzzling that public attention has been paid to presidential candidate John Kerry's practice of his Catholicism, and suggestions that his political views might cause a withholding of the sacraments, while we are aware of no public examination of Romney and his religious beliefs.

There's the suspicion here that the governor's public utterances on same-sex marriage are rooted in some long-held intolerance, leavened by his own boundless political ambition.

Someone should tell Mitt that gay bashing is immoral, sinful … and just plain wrong.

- Ed Forry