|
 |
LAURA DOUGLAS-BROWN
Friday, May 16, 2003
Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.), a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2004, “is gay” and “the people have a right to know,” according to a column published last week in an alternative Florida newspaper. But while no openly gay person has ever served in the U.S. Senate, Foley’s staff contends the issue is irrelevant to voters.
“Generally, I just don’t discuss Congressman Foley’s personal life with reporters,” Kirk Fordham, Foley’s chief of staff, told the Washington Blade on Tuesday when asked point blank if Foley is gay.
“When Congressman Foley travels around the state, voters are a lot more interested in his view on things like prescription drugs or Medicare reform or the threat terrorism poses to their lives,” Fordham said. “He doesn’t ask about their personal lives, and they certainly aren’t asking about his.”
Foley was not available for interviews on the subject, according to Fordham.
Foley and Fordham also declined interviews with the New Times Broward-Palm Beach for writer Bob Norman’s May 8 column, “Out with the Truth.”
In the nearly 2,000-word column, Norman decries the way most media outlets have ignored the issue of Foley’s sexual orientation, even while reporting on a possible controversy over his voting record on gay issues, which is much more positive than many Republicans.
“Those votes, of course, were more likely motivated by his personal life, or if you prefer the cynical view, by a strategy to keep gay constituents at bay so they won’t force him out of the closet,” Norman wrote.
The column quotes several sources — ranging from an openly gay Democrat who serves on the Wilton Manors City Council to a member of Florida’s Christian Coalition chapter — who say it is well known, though not openly discussed, that Foley is gay.
But the most direct evidence in the article comes from Tracy Thorne, who gained national recognition when he came out while serving in the U.S. military to protest the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
While Thorne, now an attorney, has urged Foley to come out for years, he offered evidence for the first time supporting his claim that the Florida Republican is gay. He told Norman that Foley — a family friend — brought his boyfriend on a visit to the Thornes in the early 1990s.
“Based on all of the people I spoke with, I felt sure [Foley] was gay, but what put it over the top was Tracy Thorne,” Norman said in an interview this week. “He has no reason to lie about it.”
Thorne could not be reached for comment.
Fordham declined to discuss Thorne’s claim, noting that, “I really don’t know what he is referring to.”
“I would point out that Tracy — who I think is a very courageous young man who certainly served his country well — made a decision when he entered the military to withhold information about his own personal life,” said Fordham.
“He served for quite some time in the military dishonestly, and I think it is unfair of him to now demand that everyone else disclose details about their personal lives, especially when it may affect their job or position in society.”
The issue first came up in 1994, during Foley’s first run for Congress, when according to Norman, the GOP primary opponent sent out mailings alleging that Foley was gay. One publication at the time quoted Foley as saying, “I like women,” Norman reported in his column
Foley readies senate run
Foley will formally announce “in the next couple of months” his bid for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), according to Fordham.
Graham’s decision to run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination touched off a scramble among candidates, both Republican and Democrat, for his potentially open Senate seat. Foley has said he will run for the post even if Graham changes his mind and seeks re-election.
No openly gay person has ever served in the U.S. Senate, and only three out of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are gay.
Out of the more than half million elected offices in the country, there are only 246 openly gay officials and only 17 in Florida, according to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based group that supports gay candidates across the nation. None of the 246 was elected in statewide races.
Jason Young, spokesperson for the Victory Fund, criticized Norman’s decision to “out” Foley.
“We are opposed to outing anyone,” Young said, adding that he has no “insider information” about Foley. “We want people to be openly gay candidates by their choice — the whole idea is to be honest with the electorate.”
As Norman notes in his column, he is not the first journalist to broach the subject of Foley’s sexual orientation, although he is the first to state as fact that Foley is gay.
National gay magazines Advocate and Out, both broached the subject in 1996, when Foley voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of gay marriages.
“Frankly, I don’t think what kind of personal relationships I have in my private life is of any relevance to anyone else,” Foley said in a written statement to the Advocate at the time.
Whether “outing” a public official is ever appropriate was hotly debated then, and remains strongly contested today.
“People who choose to lead a public life know that their lives are open for discussion to the media, and whenever it is relevant to a larger story, their sexual orientation, just like their tax returns or anything else, should be discussed,” said Michelangelo Signorile, a gay writer and activist who penned the 1996 Out article.
In the past, outing has usually been reserved for politicians who are secretly gay but oppose gay rights. With the exception of DOMA, however, Foley has supported legislation backed by gays, including co-sponsoring the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill to ban anti-gay job bias.
“As a conservative, Congressman Foley has been a longtime advocate for getting government out of people’s lives,” Fordham said. “He has been consistent in his view that government should not interfere with private enterprise or private lives.”
But voters deserve to know if there is another motivation behind Foley’s votes, Norman said, especially because they represent a “hard left turn” from his other Republican positions.
“It is something voters should know about,” he said. “Mark Foley doesn’t answer honestly — I won’t say he lies, but he hides from the truth … Might not this be actually, for lack of a better word, for a selfish motive?”
Both supporters and opponents of outing framed their arguments in terms of privacy, citing the pending Supreme Court challenge to the Texas law banning gay sodomy. Two gay men, arrested in a private bedroom, brought the case, arguing that the law violates their rights to privacy and equal protection.
Norman said recent attention to the case — and the now infamous remarks by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) supporting the law and comparing homosexuality to incest and bestiality — helped prompt him to pen his story outing Foley.
“People in his party want to criminalize, or keep criminalizing, one of the most basic human expressions,” he said.
Fordham, however, called it “unfortunate” that “some in the gay community who, on the one hand, are outraged when law enforcement officials in Texas violate the rights of two men in their homes then feel the need to pry into the personal lives of their elected officials.
“I see a pretty glaring inconsistency in the view of the gay community in how they treat their elected officials,” Fordham said.
In addition to the Victory Fund, officials with the Human Rights Campaign and the Log Cabin Republicans — two national gay rights groups that have backed Foley — said they oppose outing people against their will.
Young, from the Victory Fund, also cited the Texas case in explaining why his group opposes the practice.
While openly gay candidates “have honesty on their side,” which can be a strong signal to voters that they will also be honest about other issues, “there is the other competing interest, which is privacy,” he said.
“Gays and lesbians have just been before the Supreme Court arguing for our right to privacy in our committed relationships, so to take that away from Congressman Foley or anyone else in the name of politics is just dirty and also hypocritical,” Young said.
Impact on Senate bid
Of the three openly gay people currently serving in Congress, only one — Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) — came out prior to first being elected to the body. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) were already serving in the U.S. House when they acknowledged being gay, although both have been re-elected since.
Frank, first elected in 1980, came out in 1987, while Kolbe, first elected in 1984, came out in 1996 while under scrutiny from the Advocate, along with Foley, for his vote in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Baldwin and Kolbe did not respond to interview requests on Foley’s outing by press time, while Frank said Foley shouldn’t be surprised by the questions.
“The Republican Party really isn’t hospitable to gay rights,” Frank said in an interview in Atlanta, where he met with gay leaders to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) “So [Foley] decided he would run, and he knew it would provoke lots of discussion and politics. You stick your head out and you expect to take a couple of hits.”
How big those hits might be remains to be seen.
Florida’s Republican Party does not endorse candidates in the primary and had little official response to Norman’s column.
“Congressman Foley is a valued member of our Republican family, and we are not going to engage in this gossip and innuendo,” said Towson Fraser, communications director.
The state party has officially chartered the Broward County chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, and state Republican Party Chair Carole Jean Jordan will speak to the group next month, Fraser said.
Still, Fraser demurred when asked if he thought Florida’s Republican voters would back an openly gay candidate in a statewide race. “That’s something we’ll have to see if an openly gay candidate runs for office,” he said.
While doubting the strategy would work, Fordham said there is “no question” Norman’s column was “politically motivated.”
“Most of the people quoted in the article are Democratic activists with a political agenda,” he said. “There are many who believe that they pushed for this article to prevent Mark Foley from getting the nomination in the Republican primary because they think he would be the stronger candidate in the general election.”
Norman denied that his column was prompted by any of his sources or anyone else outside of the newspaper. But Norman, who said he is heterosexual, declined to disclose his political party affiliation, although he said he plans to change it to independent. In a 2000 column, he described himself as a Democrat.
Hastings Wyman, a longtime political commentator and founder of the bipartisan Southern Political Report, said how much speculation on Foley’s sexual orientation will affect his Senate bid will depend on how much attention the issue gets in the mainstream press, which has so far ignored the story.
“If it does get some major attention, he will have to respond in some fashion, and it could potentially hurt him very badly in a Republican primary,” Wyman said.
Former Congressman Bill McCollum, currently the only other Republican to say that he will definitely run for the seat, sponsored gay-inclusive hate crime legislation. Among his top campaign advisors is Arthur Finkelstein, a GOP consultant known for hard-hitting, negative campaign ads whose recent clients include former North Carolina Sens. Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth. But Finkelstein is also openly gay and lives with his partner and their two adopted children.
MORE INFO
Rep. Mark Foley
104 Cannon HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
202-225-5792
www.house.gov/foley
|
