You guys, I'm about to tell you something shocking that I doubt anyone saw coming: Mitt Romney — smiling, gazing longingly at people, wincing and blinking, skin tanned by the bright orange Jergens sun, hair shellacked to look like a baby Ronald Reagan, hugger of babies, loving America so much he lets it be the little spoon whenever it wants — is actually a homophobic asshole. I'm not name-calling; that's the technical term for a guy who spent much of his time as Governor of Massachusetts actively making life difficult for children who dared be born to same-sex parents.

The Boston Globe put together a pretty depressing rundown of how willfully mean Romney was to same-sex couples when he was Governor of The State Least Likely to Vote For Him During the 2012 Presidential Election. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you see, gay marriage has been legal since 2003. And that makes people like Mitt Romney — homophobes — decidedly un-gay.

According to the Globe piece, the state's Registry of Vital Records requested that the Governor sign off on a change to birth certificates for children born to gay married couples. The old hetero-only certificates contained spaces for both "mother" and "father," and the Registry recommended the space for "Father" be amended to read "Father or second parent." Simple, right? Well, not when you've got someone with a homo-allergy so severe he should carry an epi-pen around running the state government.

Rather than complying with the Registry's request, the Romney administration instead insisted on individually reviewing every child of same sex parents' birth certificate and personally amending the birth certificate by crossing out "father" and writing "second parent" by hand. The state's Department of Health warned Romney that this ridiculous crusade was actually putting children of same-sex couples at a disadvantage, as having a birth certificate with handwriting on it could feasibly cause children in a post-9/11 world to undergo increased scrutiny when applying for anything requiring proof of birth or citizenship.