Sep 30, 2005  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR.  | COMMENTS     

the large sums of money they have raised to organize mass protest demonstrations in Washington and in the states.

“With all their millions, how many rights have we gotten?” Tyler asks. “If anyone was running a private business with that kind of huge budget and came back year after year without a successful product, they would be fired.”

Tyler acknowledges her view represents a minority within the mainstream gay rights movement.

More of HRC’s critics have surfaced among gay Republicans, who have long disputed HRC’s claim to be a bipartisan organization.

Frank Ricchiazzi, a veteran gay Republican activist in California who helped found the gay GOP group Log Cabin Republicans, has called HRC a “thinly disguised arm” of the Democratic National Committee.

Ricchiazzi and other gay Republican leaders have said they have no objections to HRC raising money to defeat anti-gay Republican candidates for Congress or other elective offices. But gay GOP activists have complained that HRC appears to have collaborated with Democratic Party officials — many of whom are gay — to back Democratic opponents of moderate Republicans who are supportive or show signs of becoming supportive on gay rights issues.

HRC has said it bases its decision to endorse or oppose candidates strictly on their records on gay and AIDS related issues. HRC officials have said the group endorses more Democrats than Republicans because Democratic candidates have tended to be more supportive than their GOP counterparts on gay civil rights issues.

Following that formula, however, got HRC in trouble with its mostly liberal, Democratic membership in the early 1990s when it endorsed former Senator Alfonse D’Amato, a conservative Republican, in his re-election bid against current New York Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat.

D’Amato, who had not been known as a gay rights supporter when first elected to the Senate, changed his position by backing gay rights legislation and bucking his own party by calling on the Pentagon to allow gays to serve openly in the military.

Patrick Guerriero, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, said HRC has worked collaboratively with Log Cabin in recent years to achieve common gay rights goals, even though the two groups disagree on various issues.

“The challenge for the next phase of HRC’s history should be to extend its role to reach more conservative Democrats and Republicans across the country,” Guerriero said.

“HRC is the largest of our political institutions and has done the most comprehensively for our community,” said Jeff Trammell, a public relations executive and Democratic Party campaign consultant who has served in the past on the HRC board.

“There is no better example of how our community has institutionalized our efforts to advance our rig