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ADRIAN BRUNE
Friday, July 23, 2004
The man heading up the effort by Republicans to keep control of the United States
Senate is the latest gay politico to be outed by local activists.
Jay Timmons, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial
Committee, declined comment this week on efforts to publicize his sexual orientation.
But a spokesperson for the NRSC, Dan Allen, said that the committee has a policy
of nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
“We hire the people who we think have the best abilities for this job
and these campaigns,” he said. “We represent a wide variety of
views in candidates, and we don’t expect staffers to be ideologically
aligned with them all.”
Timmons got his NRSC post because his boss, Virginia Sen. George Allen, was
named to head the GOP group in 2002. Timmons had been Allen’s chief of
staff in his Senate office and also worked for the conservative Republican
when he was Virginia’s governor.
Allen announced his support for the Federal Marriage Amendment in the weeks
leading up to a Senate vote on the measure, which would change the U.S. Constitution
to ban gay marriage. Republican leaders used their majority control of the
Senate to bring the FMA to a vote and have vowed to do so again.
The NRSC, headed by Timmons, has the single responsibility to ensure the election
of Republican candidates to the Senate and has declared its intention to seize
upon the issue of same-sex marriage to motivate conservative voters to unseat
congressional Democrats.
Minutes after the results were tallied on the amendment’s roll call
vote last week, Republican Senate candidates in the South and West sent out
angry statements through the NRSC proclaiming the end of marriage should Democrats
take control of Congress.
Local gay activist Michael Rogers, who has led the effort to out gays working
for conservative politicians, has compared Timmons to the late Roy Cohn, the
high-profile gay attorney who started his career as an aide to former anti-communist
Senator Joseph McCarthy.
“What this community is saying is that we will no longer tolerate the
Roy Cohns of the world,” Rogers said. “We’re talking about
gay men working for homophobes in the day, raising money for them and advocating
their policies, and then going to the bars at night. Jay Timmons is a Roy Cohn.”
Allen, Timmons’ political mentor, scored a 14 on the Human Rights Campaign
scorecard for the 107th Congress, credited only with establishing a written
non-discrimination policy for his own staff.
Timmons, who also sits at the helm of the Republican Presidential Task Force,
last spring attended a Heritage Foundation reception for a group of students
from Regent University, a Christian graduate school founded by Pat Robertson.
Alongside anti-gay Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and Rep. Marilyn Musgrave
(R-Colo.), the author of the FMA, Timmons gave a detailed presentation on the
most contentious Senate races in the country and the NRSC’s strategy
for winning them.
An instrumental figure in Allen’s career since his 2000 bid for Senate,
Timmons has served as Allen’s campaign manager, spokesperson, chief of
staff and now his representative at the NRSC.
Some say, in an extended olive branch to Virginia gay residents, Timmons arranged
the then-Senatorial candidate’s 2000 controversial meeting with the Log
Cabin Republican Club of Northern Virginia, in which he promised to “keep
an open door toward their concerns.”
But that move didn’t give Timmons amnesty from the activists’ current
campaign, said John Aravosis, who along with Rogers is heading up the effort
to out gays they believe are working against the interests of gay people.
“Even if [Timmons] didn’t truly believe in all of the committee’s
stances, he can’t just get by with a nudge, nudge and a wink, wink, anymore,” said
Aravosis, who is himself a former staff attorney himself for anti-gay Sen.
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).
What started as a personal battle against the Federal Marriage Amendment on
Capitol Hill has now developed into an indefinite crusade to “expose
more homophobes inside the gay community,” Rogers said this week.
Rogers and Aravosis have been using their Web sites to out closeted members
of Congress who support the FMA and their gay staff members.
On his Web site this week, Rogers called on supporters to follow his lead
on these outings.
“If you are like me, you’re probably wondering: How, in America,
in 2004, can an openly gay man live with himself while he works to elect those
that would ensure second-class citizenship upon his own community?” Rogers
wrote.
He then urged others to call Timmons’ office.
“Now some of you might find this impossible to believe, but pick up
the phone and call him, just like I did.”
With that entreaty, Rogers launched a slightly altered, and considerably more
aggressive approach in his campaign to “highlight” the sexual orientations
of gay staffers who work for anti-gay legislators.
Rogers, who discussed the outing phenomemon Tuesday night in an appearance
on “The O’Reilly Factor” with conservative Fox News host
Bill O’Reilly, asserted that the campaign he spearheaded “has accomplished
100 times more than we set out to do.”
His next step, he said, will be to monitor and reveal the actions of straight
pro-family politicians, backing “pro-family” platforms, but not
personally abiding by them.
“I believe that every bit of activism counts,” Rogers said.
Adrian Brune can be reached at abrune@washblade.com.
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