Gays fighting for political office face backlash

By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Openly homosexual candidates are running for
political office in national, state and local elections in greater numbers
this year than ever before.

That's one side of the coin. The other is that they face a bitterly hostile
reception from an array of conservative politicians and radical Christian
groups.

"There's an unprecedented amount of anti-gay rhetoric. It aims to inflame
passions, scare people and raise funds for radical groups," said William
Waybourn, director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, an organization
designed to help gay candidates win political office.

This year, the Victory Fund has endorsed 25 candidates for various races to
be decided in mid-term elections November 8 and has raised nearly $300,000.

The candidates include Karen Burstein, running for New York State Attorney
General, Tony Miller, running for California Secretary of State and Tom
Duane, the nation's first openly HIV positive candidate to run for Congress.

Duane is running for the House of Representatives in a heavily gay district
in Manhattan. He faces a Democratic primary September 13.

But Waybourn said gays still had a long way to go. He noted there were no
openly gay members of the Senate and only two of the 425 members of the House
of Representatives were avowed homosexuals -- Gerry Studds and Barney Franks,
both from Massachussetts.

Of almost half a million elected officials currently serving in the United
States, only 120 were openly gay or lesbian, according to a recent count by
the Victory Fund.

Yet, even as homosexuals strive to raise their level of representation,
powerful forces are mobilizing against them. Six states -- Idaho, Missouri,
Arizona, Michigan, Washington and Oregon -- will vote on propositions seeking
to restrict gay rights in some way in November.

For example, the Idaho initiative would repeal and block laws and policies
which prohibit discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual citizens,
prohibit same-sex marriage and domestic partnerships, ban discussing
homosexuality in schools and the use of public funds to express acceptance of
homosexuality.

It would allow employers to consider sexual orientation as a factor in
personnel decisions. A similar initiative was passed in Colorado but was
overturned by the courts.

"It's a veiled attempt to marginalize a segment of the population," said
Waybourn bitterly. "Hitler proved that if you can marginalize a segment of
society, then you can get away with murder against them."

Victory Fund political director Kathleen DeBold saw a more sinister motive.
"The abortion issue has lost its effect as a rallying cry for the radical
right so they've switched to gay-bashing," she said.

She pointed to the activities of a host of fundamentalist Christian and
right-wing organizations. One of these is the Family Research Institute, a
Virginia-based group seeking to raise money for studies of what it says is
the disastrous social and moral effects of homosexuality.

A recent handout from this group, which carries the name of New Hampshire
Republican Senator Robert Smith and California Republican Representative
Robert Dornan on its letterhead, warns: "They have sodomized our sons" and
asks: "How long can our country survive this massive surrender to an
aggressive and hate-driven minority?"

Institute chairman Paul Cameron, who holds a doctorate in psychology from the
University of Colorado, told Reuters his data showed that homosexuals were
not only more at risk than hetrosexuals of contracting diseases like AIDS,
but also less likely to pay income tax, more likely to indulge in crime, both
petty and serious, and had inferior driving habits.

"I feel about homosexuality the way I feel about child molestation," he said.
"Even if carried out between consenting adults in their own homes, it is
dangerous. It needs to be made illegal."

Anti-gay feeling also manifests itself in more subtle ways. Newsweek
columnist Eleanor Clift recently called homophobia this year's "wedge issue."
She said any woman candidate who supported gay rights was "only a rumor away
from a whispering campaign that she is a lesbian."

In 1994, such an inference still represents a political kiss of death in many
parts of the country.