Conservative Pulse

Long-shot Republican candidate Alan Keyes has launched a blistering attack against Mitt Romney on the issue of gay marriage.

“Mitt Romney is single-handedly responsible for instituting same-sex marriage in Massachusetts,” said Keyes.
 
“Most people are unaware of the way Massachusetts came to adopt same-sex marriage,” the former Reagan administration official said. “They think the state’s Supreme Judicial Court forced it to happen. That’s incorrect.”
 
Keyes continued on: “The court merely issued an opinion stating that, in its view, the existing marriage law was unconstitutional because it failed to allow persons of the same sex to marry. The court then gave the legislature 180 days to ‘take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of this opinion’ — implicitly telling lawmakers to come up with a new marriage statute.” 

Why then, Keyes asked, did Massachusetts become the first state to adopt same-sex marriage — if in fact the legislature never changed the law to reflect the decision of the court?
 
The answer, he said, is that “Mitt Romney pushed through same-sex marriage all by himself, in the absence of any authority or requirement to do so, having a complete misunderstanding of his role as governor and of the significance of the court’s opinion.”
 
“The court never ordered him to act, nor did he have the right to act, since the legislature never changed the law,” said Keyes. “Romney claimed he had no other choice, but that’s completely untrue.”
 
“The appropriate course of action for Romney was to do nothing,” Keyes commented, since the legislature gave him no new law to enforce. Instead, “as governor, he created, in essence, his own same-sex marriage rule and then enforced it — reportedly threatening local clerks with dismissal if they refused to comply with his executive order,” Keyes noted.

In New Hampshire, Iowa, and other early states Keyes has failed to register more than a few thousand votes combined.  But he might stand to benefit if Romney and Huckabee are forced from the race after Super Tuesday.  He’s already decided to focus his limited resources on Texas and those late primaries.  That might allow Keyes to accumulate some votes and a few delegates as a protest candidate.

In the 2000 primaries, Keyes finished third in Iowa with almost 15% of the vote. That showing secured him increased press coverage and 4 delegates to the national convention. He won only 6% in New Hampshire, and then spent several months campaigning and winning only marginal showings of between 2% and 6% in a long list of primaries. Once John McCain had dropped out of the race and George W. Bush had secured enough delegates to win the nomination, Keyes would pop back up and win some protest votes here and there. His best showing in the entire contest was the Utah primary in which he won 21% of the vote, shortly after John McCain formally suspended his campaign.

Four months after the Iowa Caucus, Keyes won 19% of the vote in both the Arkansas and Idaho primaries and was awarded with 9 delegates between them.

Because he was on the ballot in every primary and continued to run long after Bush had secured the nomination, Alan Keyes was able to accumulate over 1 million votes and carry about two-dozen delegates to the convention.