Howard Dean
screwed up, and he’s sorry. Appearing May 10 on the
Christian Broadcasting Network talk show The 700
Club—antigay preacher Pat Robertson’s home
base—the chairman of the Democratic National
Committee misstated his party’s platform on marriage
equality. “The Democratic Party platform from 2004
says that marriage is between a man and a
woman,” he said. In fact the platform calls for
“full inclusion of gay and lesbian
families” and says the definition of marriage
should be left up to the states.
Speaking to
The Advocate by telephone six days later,
the former Vermont governor—who signed into law the
nation’s first marriage-like civil unions law
covering same-sex couples—said simply,
“I made a mistake, and it was a bad mistake.”
But having won unprecedented LGBT support in his home
state and in his 2003 campaign for president, Dean
added, “I would hope one misstatement is not going to
destroy the relationship that I’ve had with the LGBT
community over the past four or five years.”
[See the full interview below.]
But the 700
Club incident wasn’t the first bad press
the DNC got in the gay media in 2006. In February the
Washington Blade reported that the party had,
months earlier, abolished all constituent outreach
desks—including the staff responsible for LGBT
voters—replacing minority-specific outreach
efforts with a new program called the American Majority
Partnership. Democratic Party fund-raiser Jeff Soref
resigned from the DNC in protest, telling the Blade
gays were being “remarginalized” in the party.
That same month,
a six-page Annual Report to the Grassroots issued by the
DNC failed to include any mention of LGBT issues or voters.
The party quickly issued a clarification underlining
its support for LGBT equality and distancing itself
from the apparently unofficial and incomplete
“report.” As if that wasn’t enough, the
DNC was back in the news in May, when Dean fired the
party’s gay outreach adviser, Donald Hitchcock,
shortly after Hitchcock’s partner, Paul Yandura, had
sent out an e-mail critical of the party.
Yandura’s April 20 “open letter”
accused the Democratic Party of refusing to battle
antigay statewide initiatives, such as state
constitutional amendments to outlaw marriage equality, and
suggested LGBT people withhold donations from the party.
The DNC
immediately hired Brian Bond to replace Hitchcock, and a
spokeswoman said that Hitchcock’s firing was
“not retaliation.”
A week later came
Dean’s gaff on The 700 Club.
At a time when your opponents have perfected the
art of mobilizing their base to win close elections,
what’s the chairman of the DNC doing on
The 700 Club?
We’re also trying to mobilize our base.
We have people in all 50 states knocking on doors, and
we’re doing specific [organizing] with the LGBT
community for the first time. We’re paying for these
organizers in every state—there’s 200 of
them around the country—and when we train them,
among all the other things they have to [learn],
specifically, is how to empower our friends and family
in the LGBT community. We talk to them about how to
talk about LGBT issues, with the straight community and with
the LGBT community. We also have an arrangement with
Stonewall Democrats—they were very active in
our million-household canvass two weeks ago.
We’re really trying to integrate the LGBT community
so they don’t just talk to each other, they
also speak to the straight community—because
ultimately, I think, that’s how we’re going to
start converting folks to understand that gay
Americans are Americans first, who happen to be gay.
But while it’s good to hear that the DNC is doing
grass-roots organizing on gay issues that we
haven’t necessarily heard about, what we
see on the news is you on The 700 Club. Gay
voters supported your presidential campaign [in 2003 and
early 2004] because they saw you as cutting through the
bullshit and speaking your mind. Now you appear to
be pandering to the antigay far right. Why should
gay voters trust you with their issues when
you’re on The 700 Club?
Well, to be honest with you, I was hurt a little
bit by the reaction, because I certainly made a
mistake in misstating the party’s platform.
How did that happen?
Because that was the position that the presidential
candidate had in the last election—I just
assumed that that was the party platform, and it
wasn’t. I just made a mistake, and it was a bad
mistake, but if you look at what else I said on [the
Christian Broadcasting Network]—and it’s not
the last time I’m going to go on CBN—I went on
and I said gay people need to be included. We stand up
for equal rights for every American and the belief
that everybody deserves to live with dignity and respect.
That wasn’t sent around in all those e-mails,
but that was part of the transcript too. Look, I
don’t defend the mistake I made—I made a
mistake and I misstated the party’s platform, but I
also stood up for gay and lesbian Americans on that
show. Look, with my history, there’s no way
I’m going to back away from the LGBT community.
But then why eliminate all discussion of gay issues
and gay voters from the DNC’s Grassroots Report,
which came out earlier this year?
To be honest with you, I don’t know what the
Grassroots Report is, I’m embarrassed to say.
[DNC spokesman Damien LaVera explained after
this interview that the so-called Grassroots
Report was not an official DNC publication but a
fund-raising e-mail on which Governor Dean had no
input. The e-mail also failed to mention outreach
to African-American voters, LaVera noted.]
When we all know that privately, many Democratic
politicians support marriage equality, why can’t
the Democratic Party take a firm stand on equality?
Well, I think we do take a firm stand on equality;
there’s no question about that.
But not for marriage equality.
Well, the question is how we get to equality under the
law for all Americans, and I think the Democratic
Party has provided that [plan]. It’s obviously
a difficult debate, but there’s no backing away from
equal rights under the law for all Americans,
including gay and lesbian Americans. The question is
how do you get there, and I think that’s
what’s still being debated.
Do you personally support marriage equality for
same-sex couples?
I’ve never answered that question. What I have
said is that I support equal rights under the law for
every single American.
That sounds like you want to say you’re in favor
of marriage equality without saying you’re in
favor of marriage equality.
You know, I represent a party that has a very broad
constituency. I think there are people who are
committed to equal rights under the law but
don’t think you have to have [same-sex] marriage in
order to do it, and there are people who think you
have to have marriage. I’m not a candidate at
this point; all I can do is say is that we’re going
to continue to work really hard for equal rights under
the law, and we’re going to continue to work
really hard to kill nasty approaches and divisive
approaches like the marriage amendment [which would write
antigay marriage discrimination into the U.S. Constitution
and has been scheduled for an early-June vote in the
U.S. Senate by Majority Leader Bill Frist]. We do not
support amendments to the United States Constitution
that scapegoat communities.
Why do you think it makes news when someone like
Sen. Russ Feingold comes out in favor of marriage
equality? Why aren’t more Democratic
politicians who privately favor marriage equality
putting that into their campaigns and platforms?
Because I think it’s extremely controversial, and
we need to work through that controversy.
There’s a lot of education that has to be done,
and that’s why we decided to ask Stonewall
[Democrats] to help us with the [50-state] canvass.
It’s why we got rid of the so-called gay desk and
all the other desks, because we wanted to integrate folks
into our approach to mainstream voters. We
don’t want to pigeonhole, for example, gay
staff or black staff or Hispanic staff or anybody else
anymore. We want to have an outreach [effort] that
emphasizes the diversity of our party. My guess is, we
have more LGBT staffers at the DNC now than we’ve
ever had before. Those folks can do a lot more than just do
LGBT outreach, but each time they represent themselves
as openly gay or lesbian to an American who happens to
be straight, that American finds a human being
who’s a competent, qualified person who happens to be
gay, and that kicks the ball down the court in terms
of equal rights under the law.
Coming out is always a political act, I agree. But
it’s a very private one. I think gay and lesbian
voters are looking for the Democratic Party and
Democratic candidates to take a firm public stand
on issues of equality: on overturning the
military’s “don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy, on support for gay
youth, on rights for gay parents, on scrapping
abstinence programs in favor of real AIDS prevention
education. Why can’t Democratic candidates stand
up and say very firmly that these things need to
be addressed?
I’m happy to do that. When I was running
for president, I did that. Don’t forget,
I’m still on record as opposing [the federal] DOMA
[signed by President Clinton] and thinking that
“don’t ask, don’t tell” ought to
be eliminated. I still publicly make fun of the Bush
administration for kicking out Arab translators
because they happened to be gay. I’m with you
on all these issues. I think it’s very
important—I have to underline this—that
the LGBT community and the Democratic Party not get divided
over the one issue that we’re still having a big
conversation about, which is the conversation about
marriage equality. Because all the other things,
certainly, the chairman of the DNC is with you on. And many
Democrats are with you on. Maybe not all; maybe not as many
as we think should [be]. But I am with you on
“don’t ask, don’t tell”; I am
with you on adoption rights; I am with you on DOMA.
I’m not perfect, but I think when you compare
us to the other side, we’re pretty close.
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