November 12, 2004

The next step

Leaders prepare effort to halt or remove Ohio’s new marriage ban amendment

by Eric Resnick

Columbus--Ohio’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender leaders have begun a response to the Issue 1 constitutional amendment which, unless stopped by a court, will take effect December 2. The measure, passed by voters last week, bans same-sex marriage, civil unions and benefits to all non-married couples.

Individuals and groups including the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and the national Lambda Legal Defense are developing strategies to challenge the measure in court.

ACLU Ohio legal director Jeff Gamso said his office gets several calls and e‑mails each day from people worried about losing rights and benefits from it.

“We’re going to fight and it will take time,” said Gamso. He encouraged people to continue contacting him, so he can find an example of real harm to take to court.

“Don’t assume you have lost everything,” said Gamso, “We don’t want universities, for example, ditching their domestic partner benefits before a court tells them they have to.”

Gamso said since no one is sure what the second sentence of the amendment means, courts will make decisions about what it includes “based on their speculation of what it means.”

The sentence bars recognition of “legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.”

Lambda senior counsel Patricia Logue said their priority is to see that the second sentence is interpreted narrowly in order to minimize its impact.

“Nothing approximates marriage except marriage,” said Logue, referring to the amendment’s language. “The other side will be trying to give [the amendment] tentacles and trying to give it more impact that it should have.”

Logue said Lambda’s experience litigating domestic partner cases has shown that anything other than marriage is a “different animal.”

“In this case,” said Logue, “it was sold as a marriage measure, and state courts are generally not looking to send gay couples into a land of no rights.”

Logue also encourages anyone who believes they are harmed by the amendment to contact her office.

Repeal effort begins

LGBT leaders have begun to come together to plan a campaign to repeal the amendment.

Following a meeting of community leaders, the Lesbian Gay Service Center of Cleveland issued a statement saying, “We have committed to work together to achieve equality--no matter how long it takes.”

“We will show the proponents of the amendment that we will not be intimidated, that we have not been defeated, and that we will eventually be treated as equal before the law,” the statement continues.

Stonewall Columbus executive director Kate Anderson issued a statement telling the LGBT community, “Because the amendment was so vicious, it has given us a mechanism for maintaining a dialogue on gay rights.”

“This is the beginning of something, not the end,” said National Gay and Lesbian Task Force director of organizing and training Dave Fleischer.

“[Same-sex marriage] was used to stigmatize gay people,” said Fleischer, “and it will keep coming up like the abortion issue does.”

Fleisher said the passage of amendments in 11 states means that LGBT people will achieve marriage equality “later rather than sooner and in fewer places,” but as long as some states do not amend their constitutions, there will still be same-sex marriage.

“It depends on how long a view you take,” said Fleischer, who described a “long term view” as 60 to 90 years.

“But if we don’t do better [defeating amendments] by 2006, the landscape will be different,” said Fleischer. “I am very concerned about the issue in the short term.”

Fleischer said the lesson to be learned in Ohio is to start campaigning for the battles ahead.

“Ohio LGBTs need to get serious in the scale on which campaigns are operated,” said Fleischer.

“A campaign at the scale needed to defeat the amendment would have raised $5-10 million, had 10,000 volunteers, and identified pro-gay voters,” said Fleischer. “I know it sounds like a lot, but people can start doing bite-sized chunks of that right now.”

National amendment will be back

National LGBT leaders and allies are discussing plans to respond to the result of the national election and the 11 states where marriage ban amendments passed.

The election was arguably a setback for LBGT equality, as exit polls show that a quarter of the electorate voted on “moral values” which has been interpreted as including opposition to gay marriage.

President Bush’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove, who promoted a federal constitutional amendment against marriage and the state amendments as part of his strategy to rally four million evangelical conservative voters, restated the president’s intention to put a high priority on the federal amendment on the Sunday after the election.

Rove said on NBC’s Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday that Bush will “absolutely” use his second term to push for the federal constitutional amendment.

“If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal,” said Rove on Fox, “And the ideal is that marriage ought to be and should be a union of a man and a woman.”

Rove continued, “We cannot allow local activist officials to thumb their nose at 5,000 years of human history and determine that marriage is something else.”

Conservatives flex their muscle

Having the amendments on eleven state ballots gave George W. Bush the conservative voter turnout necessary to win the election.

Exit polls show that voters were highly motivated to vote for Bush around issues of “moral values,” which included gay marriage, abortion, leadership style and his faith-based governance.

“The anti-gays have interpreted this as vindication of their perspective and their political capability,” said Fleischer. “It is dangerous for us to think of them as invincible. They’re not.”

Fleischer said other gains made by the right in this election resulted from the decades they have spent becoming essential to the Republican Party.

“Republicans are not capable of winning majority without them,” said Fleischer.

Fleischer said one of the payoffs for religious conservatives is that they will play a major role in shaping the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I am concerned the Supreme Court will be ruined for our lifetime,” said Fleischer. “Congress is still almost equally divided, but there will be a shift in the balance of institutional power [away from the courts], and this will lead to not being able to get a fair hearing on LGBT issues or an entire range of social justice concerns.”

Religious conservatives are already flexing some of their new political muscle to try to keep Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania from heading the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee that considers nominees to the bench.

Specter, who is pro-choice and has been generally moderate on social issues, said after the election that judges who staunchly oppose abortion would not be likely to be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the Senate.

That statement has stirred a firestorm of opposition to him by religious conservatives. Groups including the anti-gay Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, and Ohio’s Citizens for Community Values--all of which also led the campaigns to pass marriage amendments--have begun mobilizing their members against Specter, causing him to re-evaluate his position.

“Specter has tried to distance himself from what many took as a warning last week that the president not nominate social conservatives for the courts,” said CCV president Phil Burress in a statement rallying members to oppose Specter.

The Log Cabin Republicans endorsed Specter’s re-election bid. Spokesperson Chris Barron said he was confident Specter would weather the storm and be installed as Judiciary chair.

Senate moves to the right

Barron said that he believes there are still enough votes in the Senate to stop the federal marriage amendment when it comes back.

Republicans won an additional four seats in the Senate giving them 55 seats.

Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who is said to have worked very hard behind the scenes on LGBT equality, was defeated. In every other seat Republicans gained, victory went to anti-gay religious conservatives.

In Oklahoma, Republican Tom Coburn won a seat in the Senate. In 2001, Coburn was picked by President Bush to head the presidential AIDS commission despite strong protest.

While a member of the House of Representatives, Coburn said high school girls should not be allowed to use the restroom in groups because of the “problem” of lesbianism.

Coburn told fellow Republicans that gays and lesbians are “the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today.”

South Carolinians elected Republican Jim DeMint to the U.S. Senate. He campaigned that “single women with children and homosexuals should not be allowed to teach in high schools.”        

Petro asked to apologize for joke about gays

by Eric Resnick

Columbus--Ohio’s top law enforcement officer has been asked to apologize for an anti-gay remark he reportedly made during a staff training session.

Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican and declared candidate for governor in 2006, has not denied making the remark in front of 1,100 employees on November 4.

An offended staffer told the Buckeye Region Anti-Violence Organization that Petro was “in the midst of telling a story about people kissing him on the cheek while campaigning. He stopped and said, ‘I mean just the women. We passed Issue 1, so we don’t have to deal with those people any more.’ ”

The employee added that “half the crowd stood to their feet and cheered,” while “the union folks and 24 gay lawyers walked out.”

“It was a poor attempt of a joke on his part,” said Petro’s director of constituent services Mark Gribben. He added that he believes Petro meant no harm.

Gribben said he doesn’t remember anyone walking out of the meeting.

“I was working at the event, so I was listening, but otherwise engaged,” said Gribben.

Gribben said he recalls a reference to Issue 1 by Petro, but it was in reference to something about the cold the attorney general caught while campaigning the previous Sunday at a fundraiser.

“We were unaware of anything he said that could be construed as homophobic or gay bashing until we started getting phone calls,” said Gribben. “He was most likely speaking sarcastically.”

Gribben said he had gotten about 20 calls on the matter as of the morning of November 8.

There is no recording of the meeting.

Gribben guessed that Petro must have been poking fun at Issue 1, not gay people “from the standpoint that it is bad law.”

“The track record of our office on gay rights does not follow this,” said Gribben, noting that Petro was the first Republican state official to condemn Issue 1.

“He supports equal rights for partners and civil unions,” said Gribben, also adding that the office has been recognized for its commitment to diversity and its work helping small counties prosecute hate crimes.

BRAVO president Chris Cozad sent a letter to Petro the next day telling the attorney general “an immediate apology is in order.”

“Regardless of the details of the remark,” Cozad wrote, “this is completely unacceptable from a public servant, an elected official, and the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Ohio.”

“I know that you are well aware of the slippery slope from jokes to discrimination to violence,” Cozad continued. “Your remarks give tacit permission to hate LGBT people. You reinforced the perception that we are second class citizens, despite your opposition to State Issue 1.”

Influence of gay marriage on Bush vote is disputed

by Lisa Keen

The day after 51 percent of voters returned Republican George W. Bush to the White House for a second term, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., predicted that many people would blame gays. Sure enough, many have.

“Just a year ago, justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples have the legal right to marry. George W. Bush is thanking them today,” wrote Joan Vennochi, a columnist for the Boston Globe, in a November 4 essay. “That is the new conventional wisdom about why Kerry lost to Bush. Unfair it may be, but in the aftermath of defeat, some Democrats directly blame Margaret Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, for creating the perfect storm: unleashing a highly divisive issue that turned out a passionate Republican voter base in critical states just in time for the 2004 presidential election.”

Frank blames San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for directing that city to start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples--an event that triggered a media blitz that snowballed into other towns and cities issuing marriage licenses before any of them had clear legal authority to do so.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the same-sex weddings in San Francisco earlier this year were “too much, too fast, too soon” and energized conservative voters. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said Republicans turned gays into this election’s Willie Horton--a reference to a 1988 racially charged GOP campaign ad that accused Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime after Horton, a convicted murderer, committed another rape and murder while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

Hundreds of political pundits, politicians, and plain old ordinary citizens on radio and television talk shows have been citing gay marriage as a key factor for why they think Bush did better at the polls this year than he did in 2000.

Rove downplays marriage issue

One of the few people who has seemed hesitant to point to gay marriage as the critical issue in Bush’s re-election has been the president’s campaign “architect” himself: Karl Rove. When Meet the Press host Tim Russert asked Rove last Sunday about an exit poll showing that more people identified “moral values” as their top reason for choosing their presidential candidate, over Iraq, terrorism, the economy, or other factors, Rove downplayed the significance of the marriage issue.

“I do have a little bit of a different view of those numbers,” said Rove, referring to the exit poll’s 22 percent who voted for “moral values” over the other influences. Rove suggested that the 19 percent who listed terrorism as their most important criteria be lumped with the 15 percent who listed Iraq. Together, he noted, that was 34 percent of voters who considered “security” as their top concern. Lumping the 20 percent who listed “economy/jobs” with the 5 percent who were most influenced by “taxes,” that’s 25 percent “and then moral values is third,” he said.

“What essentially happened in this race,” said Rove, “was people became concerned about three issues--first, the war, then the economy, jobs and taxes, and, third, moral values. And then everything else dropped off of the plate.

Asked what “moral values” meant, Rove said he thought it meant that people “are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies, what they read in the newspapers, how they see the values of the country, what they see as the future for our country.”

For the pundits, “moral values” included gay marriage, Will & Grace, Roe v. Wade, and, among other things, Janet Jackson exposing her breast during the Super Bowl halftime show.

“Morality,” wrote Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., “is, of course, a code word for antipathy toward gay rights and abortion. Those who shared that antipathy voted overwhelmingly for President Bush.”

Is there anything to refute this assumption?

Bigger numbers, different story

The power of the “moral values” interpretation comes from an exit poll of more than 13,000 people nationwide. The major television news networks asked voters, “Which one issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?”

To some extent, one needs to scrutinize the results in light of the revelation that the exit polls did not accurately predict who would win in various states. To a greater extent, it should be noted that no one explained to voters what “moral values” meant.

Because “moral values” was not defined on the exit polls, no one can be sure what each voter had in mind when he or she checked off or skipped over that response. The vagueness created an opportunity for people to interpret the results in a wide variety of ways. Some suggest “moral values” refers to gay marriage, some believe it signals abortion rights, some say other things, and some say everything.

But regardless of what “moral values” meant to voters, what did it mean for the vote count? While it might have been the issue cited by more voters than any other in the exit polls nationally, it was not the most important issue in every state--not even in the 11 states which had ballot initiatives to ban same-sex marriage.

In the swing states of Ohio and Michigan, more people chose “economy/jobs” as the most important issue in choosing their president; in Oregon, “Iraq” was the most frequently cited. In Florida, it was terrorism.

Initiatives didn’t help Bush much

If Republicans put marriage initiatives on ballots in some states to push those states into the Bush column, it was a shoddy strategy of little use. Seven of the 11 states with anti-gay marriage initiatives on Nov. 2--Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Utah--were states that Bush won with substantial margins in 2000. Of the other four--Arkansas, Ohio, Michigan, and Oregon--Bush lost the latter two in 2000 and 2004.

In Ohio, Bush received a smaller percentage of the votes cast for Republicans and Democrats this year, compared to 2000. And in Arkansas, while voter turnout increased by 15 percent, Bush’s percentage of the votes cast for a major party candidate increased by only one percent over 2000.

What about in states where an anti-gay initiative wasn’t on the ballot but the gay marriage issue was just in the air, as a product of pro-gay marriage developments, such as in Massachusetts, California, and New York? Some point to an increased voter turnout overall as evidence that more conservatives were lured to the polls to cast a symbolic vote against gay marriage through President Bush.

In Massachusetts, Bush earned two percent more votes against that state’s own senator John Kerry in 2004 than he did against Tennessee’s native son Al Gore in 2000. In California, Bush increased his share of the vote by one percent. In New York, he picked up four percent more votes.

But in more conservative states, the support for Bush was surprisingly modest. Iowa’s voter turnout increased significantly this year--up 16 percent. Although Bush lost Iowa in 2000 by 4,144 votes, this year, with 206,697 more people voting, he beat Kerry. But he beat Kerry by only 13,471 votes—hardly evidence that a storm of new conservative voters were turning out to rain on the gay marriage parade.

Bush lost New Mexico in 2000 by 366 votes. This year, although 162,521 more voters turned out in New Mexico, he beat Kerry by only 8,539 votes.

Bush won Ohio in 2000 by 165,019 votes. In 2004, Ohio’s 20 electoral votes were all that separated Democrat John Kerry from the presidency. Yet, despite a 20 percent increase in voter turnout in the state (amounting to 918,412 more voters), Bush beat Kerry by only 136,483 votes. In other words, Bush’s margin in Ohio actually shrank, from 52 percent of the vote in 2000 to 51 percent in 2004–and Ohio had a marriage initiative.

It’s worth noting, too, that as Ohio approved a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, voters in the state’s third largest city–Cincinnati—repealed a charter amendment approved by voters 11 years ago that prohibited gay people from seeking protection from discrimination.

So, did gay marriage have anything to do with the presidential outcome? The exit polls seem to say yes, the ballots cast seem to suggest otherwise. The answer is not clear and easy.

It is also relevant, for instance, to look at how African Americans voted. Eleven percent of African Americans voted for Bush this year--up from only 8 percent in 2000. Why? The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies said it’s because many blacks supported Bush’s position against gay marriage.

Young people, who were polling much more in favor of gay marriage and Kerry, did not show up at the polls in numbers many had anticipated.

How can Bush’s position on gay marriage explain that roughly the same percentage of gay voters supported him this year (23 percent) as did in 2004 (25 percent)? And to what extent is the re-election of an incumbent the reflection of human nature’s preference for maintaining the status quo?

Exit poll: 60% support couples’ rights

Whether recognition of civil unions is granted at the state or federal level, the fact that Bush now supports civil unions underscores a new political reality for gay people that represents some improvement.

It is no small matter, notes civil rights attorney Mary Bonauto, that the exit polls Nov. 2 showed that 60 percent of voters believe same-sex couples should have legal benefits through either marriage (25 percent) or civil unions (35 percent).

Bonauto, who led the legal challenge that ultimately won marriage rights in Massachusetts, said she believes the right-wing opponents of equal rights for gays are “desperate” to spin the presidential election results to make gay marriage “look like a toxic issue.”

“But moral values doesn’t mean anti-gay,” said Bonauto. “Sixty percent of voters support some kind of legal protection for gay couples. And while I understand that having 11 state amendments pass highlights our vulnerability, it’s also clear that people don’t support denying rights.”

New Cincinnati Pride committee elects co-chairs

by Anthony Glassman

Cincinnati--Plans for the 2005 Cincinnati Pride celebration continued during the monthly meeting of the new committee on October 16, with co-chairs being selected for the coming year.

Marti Kwiatkowski, president of P‑FLAG Cincinnati, and John Pennell, publisher of AllOut magazine, were elected as the co-chairs at the meeting, which drew around 40 people to St. John’s Unitarian Church.

In addition to selecting co-chairs, five subcommittees were formed to organize the event: parade, festival, rally, media and finance.

Organizers estimate that it will take 50 to 75 volunteers to put the parade and festival together, along with $30,000.

“We’re asking everyone who enjoys Pride here in Cincinnati to send a donation for start-up costs,” said David Epplenhill of Clifton Woods Apartments, who have already signed on as sponsors for this year’s event.

“November 2 will determine if it will be a Rally for Equality or a Parade in Celebration,” said Pennell of the upcoming festivities.

The original Pride committee disbanded in September, with members noting that they were burned out and that no new leaders had emerged to take their places.

After the announcement, Harold Keutzer of the Cincinnati GLBT Center organized a meeting to try to re-establish a Pride committee, which is now being run through the auspices of the Cincinnati GLBT Coalition, an organization of representatives from GLBT groups across the area.

The committee meetings are on the third Saturday of each month at noon in St. John’s Unitarian Church, 320 Resor Avenue. More information is available by calling the Cincinnati GBLT Center at 513-591‑0200, and the group has an e‑mail list that can be joined by e-mailing cincycoalitionpride-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.