Gay
Rights Issues Scuttle GOP Efforts at Unity
USA
Today, April 24, 2003
1000 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22229
Fax: 703-247-3108
Email: Editor@usatoday.com
By Jill Lawrence, USA Today
WASHINGTON—President Bush’s
drive to make his party more open and diverse is smacking up against the
Biblical beliefs of religious conservatives in three controversies over
homosexuality.
The dust-ups have disrupted the Republican Party’s
wartime unity, underscored competing political demands on Bush and spotlighted
the continuing debate over the status of gay men and lesbians.
Christian conservatives are a big enough voting bloc to
sway an election if they stay home. Republican analysts say millions did so in
2000, costing Bush a victory in the popular vote. Outreach to gay people,
meanwhile, has played a small but symbolic role in Bush’s “compassionate
conservative” pitch to swing voters, who have no ties to either party and
tend to put a high priority on tolerance.
Three incidents have converged to thrust the gay rights
issue to the forefront:
-
Bush’s handpicked party chairman, Marc Racicot,
spoke last month to 300 leaders of the bipartisan Human Rights Campaign, a
500,000-member group that promotes legal recognition of gay relationships
and protection against job discrimination. The conservative Family
Research Council calls the group “a key player on the political left”
and says of Republicans, “a political party divided against itself
cannot endure.” Bush chose Racicot to head the party, Republican
strategist Matthew Dowd says, in part because Racicot believes in
“tolerance, acceptance, openness. That’s who he is.”
-
Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the
No. 3 Republican in the Senate leadership, told the Associated Press,
“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay)
sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the
right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to
adultery.” Santorum said Tuesday that his comments pertained to the
future of state privacy laws and “should not be misconstrued in any way
as a statement on individual lifestyles.”
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the
Human Rights Campaign are urging that Santorum be ousted from his leadership
position. So is Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, who as Vermont
governor signed a “civil union” law giving legal rights to gay couples.
Log Cabin Republicans, a 10,000-member gay group, wants a public apology.
Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin
group, says Santorum’s remarks were “particularly hurtful” because they
came from a fellow Republican who has worked with his group on AIDS and other
issues. He calls the remarks a harmful “blast from the past,” specifically
the anti-gay rhetoric and talk of culture wars from Patrick Buchanan at the
1992 Republican National Convention.
Other prominent Republicans have stirred such
controversy. In late 1994, incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich called
homosexuality “an orientation in the way alcoholism is an orientation.” In
1998, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., likened homosexuality to alcoholism, sex
addiction and kleptomania.
“Kleptomania is certainly not a desirable
characteristic,” says David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights
Campaign. “But it sinks to a new low to compare gay people to people who
commit incest. That’s just despicable.” He says Santorum’s comment is as
offensive as Lott’s praise last year for Strom Thurmond’s segregationist
presidential campaign in 1948.
Pressure from other Republicans forced Lott to give up
his position as Senate majority leader. But some Republicans are rallying
around Santorum. The current majority leader, Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee,
this week called him “a consistent voice for inclusion and compassion ...
and to suggest otherwise is just politics.”
Bush, who criticized Lott’s remarks on race, has said
nothing about Santorum. “The president typically never does comment on
anything involving a Supreme Court case,” White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer said Wednesday. He said Bush’s news conference on a landmark
affirmative-action case now before the court was “a very, very rare
event.”
The 2000 Republican National Convention showcased racial
and ethnic diversity and an openly gay speaker, Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe. The
aim was to reassure swing voters, strategists in both parties say. “The
notion that you should respect people for who they are is the second most
widely shared value in the country,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman says.
“Swing voters tend to be much more on the tolerant side of the equation than
the Republican base.” Bush is the first Republican president to appoint
openly gay people to administration jobs.
GOP strategists estimate that Bush lost up to 4 million
votes in 2000 because conservative Christians did not vote. Pollster Ed Goeas
attributes the low turnout to three factors: The states they lived in were not
contested, so they saw little of Bush; their interest flagged as the campaign
became less about Bill Clinton; and they were turned off by news in the final
weekend of a Bush drunken-driving arrest decades earlier.
Republicans are determined to claim the Christian vote
along with the moderates. Analysts in both parties say it will be easier for
Republicans to reconcile the two groups than it will be for Democrats to
bridge the gap between those who supported the war in Iraq and those who
opposed it.
Bush has a 90% to 95% approval rating among Republicans,
and Dowd predicts that won’t change: “My guess is that this is more of a
concern for Sen. Santorum than broadly for the Republican Party or the
president.”
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