When John McCain
announced Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his
vice-presidential running mate in late August, the response
was near-universal astonishment. With no foreign
policy credentials, next to no national profile, and
having served in the statehouse for less than two
years, Palin has such a thin record -- both legislatively
and in terms of public statements -- that it's
difficult to predict just what sort of vice president
(or, given McCain's advanced age, president) she
might soon become. As for issues affecting gay Americans,
there's only a handful of legal decisions --
made early in her tenure as governor -- that can help
us divine where she stands.
A self-described
"hockey mom," hunting enthusiast, and
evangelical Christian, Palin has been reared in the
political culture of Alaska. It's a state whose
politics is defined at times by a libertarian,
live-and-let-live approach that fits naturally with frontier
existence and at times by a more intrusive,
religiously grounded conservatism brought by the
Southerners and Westerners who swarmed the state in the
1970s and '80s for jobs in the booming oil industry.
In 1996 the Alaska state legislature passed a law
stipulating that marriage can exist only between
people of opposite genders. A gay couple sued the state on
the basis that the measure was discriminatory. Two
years later, 68% of voters approved a constitutional
amendment banning same-sex marriage, making Alaska the
first state to amend its constitution this way.
Palin, then mayor
of Wasilla -- a city about 40 miles north of Anchorage
with a population of less than 10,000 -- supported the
marriage amendment, as did most of the state's
politicians. And she continued to solidify her
reputation as a traditional, "family values"
conservative as her political career took off. Running
for governor in 2006, she announced her opposition to
a 2005 Alaska supreme court ruling that ordered the
state government to offer health and retirement benefits to
the domestic partners of its employees; her Democratic
opponent, former governor Tony Knowles, supported the
ruling. In a questionnaire provided by the Alaska
chapter of the Eagle Forum, the socially conservative
lobbying organization founded by Phyllis Schlafly, Palin
listed "preserving the definition of
'marriage' as defined in our
constitution" as one of her highest priorities.
Palin won the
gubernatorial election comfortably -- and one of her first
acts in office was to veto a bill that would have blocked
those court-ordered benefits for same-sex couples. The
move is now cited as an example of her
"inclusiveness," but she made it only under
the advisement of the attorney general, who said the
bill violated the state constitution's equal
protection clause. In a statement released in
conjunction with the veto, Palin made clear her continued
opposition to domestic-partner benefits:
"Signing this bill would be in direct violation
of my oath of office," she said, emphasizing that her
rejection of the bill was purely legalistic and ought
not to be taken as a sign of any newfound support for
gay rights.
Palin's
gay supporters stress, however, that whatever her motives
for rejecting the bill, the governor still did the
right thing. "She opposed the ruling and said
that the rule of law was paramount to her own views,"
says Jamie Hobson, who grew up in Alaska and volunteered in
Palin's 2006 gubernatorial campaign. Hobson,
now a senior at Northern Arizona University, says that
no one working on the campaign had issues with his
homosexuality, and he defends Palin's record as
governor. "I hear people say she's
really homophobic, she's a creationist, a religious
nut case," he says. "She may believe
some of those things, but she's never pushed
that agenda down our throats." Hobson has a point.
For all the caricaturing of her as a backward
Bible-thumper in recent weeks, there's little
evidence from Palin's (albeit short) tenure as
governor that shows she has attempted to foist a
conservative religious political agenda on the state.
For instance, she hasn't nominated advocates of
creationism to the board of education; nor has she
pressured the board to add the teaching of Genesis to
school curriculums. (Palin did, however, impose her
politics on the church when she called construction on the
Trans-Alaska pipeline "God's will" and
asked people to pray for federal funding during a June
address to the Wasilla Assembly of God Church.)
Days before her
veto of the bill that would have banned domestic-partner
benefits, Palin called for a statewide "advisory
vote" to determine whether to hold a referendum
to overturn the supreme court's 2005 ruling in
favor of same-sex couples. Fifty-three percent of voters
supported the referendum, but the proposal never
gained traction in the legislature and Palin
didn't pursue it further. Hobson says gay people
should give her credit for that decision, especially
given her wildly high approval ratings in the state,
which stand near 80%. "She has the political
capital to push the issue," he says. The fact that
she hasn't seems to suggest she might not be
the religious extremist her detractors paint her to
be. "She has basically ignored social issues,
period," Gregg Erickson, an economist and
columnist with the Alaska Budget Report, told the
Associated Press.
Still,
Palin's religious affiliations have been troubling to
gay activists. In early September the Associated Press
reported that the Wasilla Bible Church, her home
church, recently promoted an "ex-gay"
conference oranized by the antigay evangelical group Focus
on the Family. Palin hasn't commented publicly
on such organizations and their controversial methods,
but during the 2006 gubernatorial race she
acknowledged that she didn't know whether people
choose to be gay. "Wasilla sort of has the
reputation of Appalachia," says Allison Mendel,
the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the domestic-partner
benefits case. "Even for Alaska it's
kind of backward."
Back when Palin
was mayor, the Wasilla Assembly of God Church pushed for
the removal of several books from the local
library--including one titled Pastor, I Am Gay.
According to press at the time, Wasilla librarian Mary
Ellen Emmons said Palin asked her how she would respond to
requests to remove books from the library's
shelves. Emmons said that she wouldn't comply.
While Palin did not name specific books to be removed, she
did fire the librarian a few weeks later. (Emmons was
reinstated after a community uproar.)
There's no
doubt gay conservatives have been warming to Palin. On
August 29, the day her selection was announced, Log
Cabin Republicans president Patrick Sammon released a
statement praising her as an "inclusive
Republican who will help Senator McCain appeal to gay and
lesbian voters." Log Cabin announced its
long-expected endorsement of McCain (his steadfast
opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment endeared him
early to the organization) four days later at the
Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
Beth Kerttula,
the Democratic minority leader in the Alaska house of
representatives, says that she hasn't had any
conversations with Palin about gay rights, and her
minimal public record makes it difficult to predict
how she would act in the White House. But she adds,
"given the governor's stand on
[reproductive] choice and other issues, I'd be
suspicious of where she stood [on gay issues]."
Several news
outlets have reported Palin's assertion, made during
the gubernatorial campaign, that she "has gay
friends." Finding these individuals has been
difficult. "We don't know anything about that
friend," says Marsha Buck, president of the
Anchorage-based gay rights group Alaskans Together for
Equality. "If that friend or those friends are
Alaskans, we don't know anything about them.
We're wondering maybe if it's a friend
who lives in the lower 48." Asked about
Palin's alleged gay friends, Mendel laughs and
says, "Don't you hate that? 'Some of my
best friends...'?"
Indeed, only one
of the Alaskans interviewed for this piece claims to
know the identity of any of Palin's gay friends.
Douglas Locke, owner of the Kodiak Bar and Grill, a
gay hangout in Anchorage, says he knows "a gay
guy who knows her" and that "he says
she's as sweet as pie around gay
people." Yet, when asked if he thought his friend
would be willing to talk about his relationship with
Palin, Locke said his friend told him no.
At press time,
the Palin selection has proved a brilliant political move
on McCain's part. It has energized the GOP's
conservative base and enlivened the race like no other
VP selection could have. The relentless media
speculation about Palin's family in the days leading
up to her convention address stirred nationwide
curiosity, leading to over 40 million
viewers--far more than her Democratic counterpart Joe
Biden earned, and only about a million shy of the
audience who tuned in for Barack Obama's
historic acceptance speech. But Buck says that
Palin's freshness on the national political
stage and the McCain campaign's tight control
of her media appearances are causing many
people--including anxious gay voters--to
project views onto the governor that they want her to
share but which she may not necessarily hold. "Her
silence is being interpreted as friendliness,"
Buck says, "and we in the gay community should
interpret that as we don't know where she
stands."