Birds on the Brain

Lani Gerson left the Mormon Church long before Mitt Romney came to excommunicate her.
Gerson, 65, grew up in Arizona and left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a teenager. When she moved to Cambridge, she began getting aggressive visitors from the church, urging her to return. She wrote to church officials asking them to stop contacting her.
One Sunday in 1982, she recalled, Romney, then a young bishop, and an assistant showed up at her doorstep inviting her to her excommunication trial.
“I was dumbfounded,” Gerson said. “I said to him, ‘I have already quit - you can’t fire me.’” Gerson said she had never before met Romney, and he did not try to engage her in conversation or discover her story.
“There was no curiosity on his part about who I was and what this was about,” Gerson said.
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The incident raises the question about Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, that has frequently come up in his campaign: Can Romney relate to the average person? Those who interacted with him during his time as a church leader in Massachusetts give differing answers. Critics, often women, say Romney was insensitive, particularly on controversial issues like abortion and gay rights. Yet Romney’s close advisers say he showed enormous compassion, particularly to teenagers and those in need.
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Carolyn Caci first spoke to Romney when he was a young bishop and she was a divorced mother of five in her 50s. Caci told Romney she was dating someone. “He went into his spiel about sex before marriage,” Caci said. “I said you’ve got to be kidding me. That’s none of your business.”
Caci does not hold it against Romney – she later heard that he regretted his words.
She was not the only woman upset by Romney. A 1994 article in the Boston Phoenix told the story of an anonymous woman (who has since been identified) who wrote an article in a feminist Mormon magazine claiming Romney, as bishop, discouraged her from having an abortion even though her health was at stake. Romney later said he could not remember the incident.
In the Phoenix story, Judy Dushku, a professor of government at Suffolk University, and church member Evelyn Harvill said they urged Romney to speak out about domestic abuse, but Romney brushed off their concerns. Harvill, who did not respond to an emailed request for comment, told the Phoenix that Romney was an “elitist” who “surrounds himself in church with rich, powerful white men.” Dushku said in an email that she found Romney “insensitive on many levels,” but declined to comment further, citing numerous media requests.
In their book, “The Real Romney,” Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman document one instance when a Mormon single mother got pregnant with her second child. Romney tried to convince the woman to give her future child up for adoption because the church encourages adoption in cases when a successful marriage is unlikely. The woman, who refused, said she was “deeply insulted.”
Another area where Romney was criticized was his attitude toward homosexuality. In July 1994, during Romney’s U.S. Senate campaign, the Boston Globe published a story saying that Romney, in a speech to a congregation of single Mormons, said he found homosexuality “perverse and reprehensible.” The story cited one named and three unnamed sources.