HOPKINTON, New Hampshire, October 12, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was pressed on abortion and homosexual “marriage” at a town-hall style meeting Monday. At the campaign event in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, Romney reaffirmed that he is “firmly pro-life” and that he views marriage as a “relationship between one man and one woman,” but said that he is in favor of same-sex “partnership agreements” that would afford certain rights.
“We’re going to call marriage what it’s been called for 6,000 years or longer: A relationship between one man and one woman,” Romney said according to CNSNews. “That’s my own view and there are alternative views.”
When a young woman told Romney that she was raised by her mother and grandmother, Romney said that while some people are raised by one parent, through divorce, through death, or through a parent out of wedlock, “in my view, a society recognizes that the ideal setting for raising a child is when you have the benefit of two people working together and where one is male and one is female.”
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When a follow-up question confronted Romney on homosexual civil unions, Romney suggest that he is in favor of some form of a “partnership agreement” for same-sex couples.
“What I would support is letting people who are of the same gender form – if you will – partnership agreements if they want to have a partnership with someone else and have as a result of that such things as hospital visitation rights and similar benefits of that nature,” he said.
CNSNews reports that Romney did not explain what other rights might be included in such partnership agreements, or whether they were the same or different than civil unions.
Romney had publicly denounced a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in November 2003 recognizing homosexual “marriage.” However, he was criticized by pro-family advocates because his administration subsequently ordered the state’s Justices of the Peace to perform the “marriages” before the legislature acted.
Romney has signed a National Organization for Marriage pledge to defend traditional marriage.
Romeny, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, also told the town hall attendees that he would like to “return to the states the authority to decide whether they want to have abortion or not.” Romney, who supported abortion as recently as his 2002 campaign for Massachusetts governor, said during his 2008 presidential run that he had a pro-life conversion in 2004 during the legislative debate over embryonic stem cell research.
Earlier this year Romney refused to sign a pro-life pledge by the Susan B. Anthony List.