Kudos to The John for being willing to ‘go there’:

Eric Fehrnstrom is called Mitt Romney’s “most trusted” adviser. Well it seems that Mr. Romney’s most trusted adviser is alleged to have “glee”-fully outed a transgender women, ending her career in politics. This from GQ: Fehrnstrom saved his cheap shots for smaller-time Massachusetts pols. When a political activist and gadfly named Althea Garrison was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the fact that she was transgender was an open secret in Boston political circles. But Fehrnstrom was the first one to put that information into print—“I can remember his glee when he found the birth certificate,” says former Herald reporter Robert Connolly—thus bringing a swift end to Garrison’s future on Beacon Hill.

Two things need to be added.

(1) The term “gadfly” is actually a bit of an understatement for a description of Garrison the politician (plus, though not out, she is – as far as anyone knows – the first and only trans person to serve as a member of an American state legislature.)

(2) Garrison is African-American.

And, as a bonus, Mitt (or, rather, his “brain”) isn’t just homophobic, transphobic, and racist…

there’s also a nice dose of misogyny:

[Fehrnstrom’s] biggest scoop of all came in December 1989, when he received a tip that Evelyn Murphy, Dukakis’s lieutenant governor, who was running to succeed him, was vacationing on Sanibel Island in Florida during budget talks. Together with a photographer, he flew from freezing Boston to sunny Sanibel and staked her out. They eventually ambushed Murphy while she was jogging, leading to an unflattering picture of her in her running shorts on the Herald’s front page—”her middle-aged thighs flouncing across 300,000 newspapers,” as Fehrnstrom would later describe it. The photograph helped end her political career.

Etch that sketch, Mittens.

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