Gay activist and columnist Dan Savage said Thursday that it didn’t matter if Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was personally anti-gay or just had anti-gay policies.

“I think he is 100 percent anti-gay,” he told Current TV host John Fugelsang. “I don’t make a distinction between an honest bigot and a dishonest bigot. The bigotry is just the same.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“My dad is a Republican and we have a quadrennial argument about who I’m going to vote for and who he is going to vote for, and he always reassures me that Republican politicians like George Bush and now Mitt Romney don’t really hate gay people,” Savage continued. “And I always tell him, whether someone punches you in the nose because they really hate you or they punch you in the nose because they want to impress people who hate you, you still have a broken god-damned nose.”

Romney has pledged to support a federal constitutional amendment that would prohibit same sex marriage.

Romney also vetoed a bill funding hate-crimes prevention in Massachusetts while he was governor. His running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), voted against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

“I’m not going to look into Mitt Romney’s stony little heart, I’m not going to bust open that bank vault in the Cayman Islands and retrieve his heart to look at,” Savage said. “What I care about is policy and his policies are homophobic, and by my estimation that man is a homophobe.”

Watch video, courtesy of Current TV, below: