Nov 19, 2004  |  By: JOE CREA  | COMMENTS     

Concern and frustration spilled out into the open this week over how the Human Rights Campaign will navigate the post-election of a capital city now even more tightly within the grasp of conservatives.

A member of the HRC’s Federal Club of key donors raised concerns at a Tuesday night meeting with HRC staff about the group’s laserlike focus on marriage equality and hinted that without a new strategy for working with the GOP-dominated government, new leadership might be needed at the country’s largest gay lobbying group.

Randy Foster, 39, said he became concerned about the direction gay groups were taking this year after talking with a congressman during a flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., three days after the election.

The lawmaker, whom Foster declined to identify, said that marriage had become such a priority for gay leaders he wondered how effective gay lobbyists would be during the next four years.

“Unless we create a new strategy, knowing we live in a conservative environment, as a community, we will be ineffective,” Foster said. “I am not criticizing that we are on the marriage bandwagon. My point is if we continue with that strategy, we will not only not get anything done on a federal level, we might have companies rethink their benefit packages to gay spouses.

“It’s unclear to me that we have a short-term strategy. Are the people who got us here able to work with the new [political] leadership? If the answer is no, then we need to do something about that.”

Foster said he raised the issue during Tuesday night’s meeting with Federal Club members and HRC staff. Members of the club make an annual contribution of $1,200 to $4,999 to HRC.

Foster said Cheryl Jacques, HRC’s executive director, told him at the meeting that, “working with this administration is going to be hard” but that HRC officials were working on a long-range plan for the next year, though she declined to elaborate.

Some donors unhappy with HRC
Foster said a short-term strategy was needed and that other Federal Club members chimed in saying that HRC’s response was “unacceptable.”

Chris Labonte, HRC’s legislative director, said that because gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts, it is impossible to retreat from the issue.

Some have criticized gay groups for pushing the marriage issue during an election year. But Jacques dismissed concerns about the timing of the gay marriage issue, adding that the “Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed us marriage equality.”

“We can’t turn that back,” Jacques said in an interview last week. “Nearly a decade ago there wasn’t a Goodridge decision in the pipelines yet 36 states in 1996 had Defense of Marriage Acts. I believe that the extremists were pushing the gay marriage boogie man for a long time now to divide people and mobilize an extreme base.”

With the passage of 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage on Election Day, Jacques said Bush campaign strategist Karl Rove, “gave the American students the final exam on the first day of class.” She added that the American public is “nowhere near ready to decide what our legal protections should look like.”

“We just started to talk to them about our families and important matters like tax and estate protections and hospital visitation rights,” Jacques said. “We need to go back to that and unite Americans on fairness and families and what fairness looks like.”

Others, including gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), have criticized HRC and other gay groups for embracing the actions of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in February.

Jacques defended the group’s support of Newsom, adding that the San Francisco mayor did not ignite the outcry from social conservatives to push ahead with the 11 state amendments. Jacques said, “that fire was already lit.”

Despite Newsom’s controversial actions, Jacques said history will judge the San Francisco mayor and other leaders “very kindly in a very long civil rights battle.”

Bipartisan HRC?
Foster also expressed concern that HRC was bending considerably to the left, adding that gay issues are not Republican or Democratic issues.

“If HRC, by its nature, should be bipartisan why have posters that say, ‘George W. Bush, you are fired,’” asked Foster. “Little or no conservatives will ...