Vocal Gay Republicans Upsetting Conservatives

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2004 — On a rainy Friday in early May, 200 members of the Log Cabin Republicans, a political advocacy group of gay men and lesbians, boarded buses at Dupont Circle, a popular neighborhood among gays here, for a pilgrimage of sorts. Their destination, the White House, was about a mile away. But for many, it had long seemed out of reach.

To gay Republicans, the visit, which included a policy briefing with senior administration officials in the Old Executive Office Building, symbolized their progress under President Bush. Although Mr. Bush did not attend, gone are the days when Bob Dole, a Republican candidate for president, refused a campaign contribution from the Log Cabin group, founded 25 years ago to promote the interests of gays in the party.

"In '96, Bob Dole returned a check," Randy Boudreaux, 33, a Log Cabin leader from Louisiana, said as the bus rolled through the streets of the capital. "Now we're going to the White House."

But the emergence of gays as a more vocal presence in Republican politics is angering some leaders of conservative groups. In recent weeks, those groups have been sending pointed messages to the White House warning that President Bush's re-election is in jeopardy if he continues to court what they call the "homosexual lobby."

White House officials dismiss the complaints, saying President Bush is simply trying to be inclusive and find common ground with gays when he can — a strategy that political analysts say has worked well for Mr. Bush on other issues.

"The president," said Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman, "believes strongly that one of the roles of a leader is to bring people together around shared priorities."

But the current tension between gays and conservatives illustrates the risks of that strategy, suggesting that the two main tenets of Mr. Bush's brand of Republicanism — the "big tent" philosophy and the "family values" agenda — may be on a collision course, just in time for the 2004 election campaign.

The first crash, people on both sides say, could be in June, when the Supreme Court is expected to rule on a case involving a Texas law banning sodomy. The case is regarded as pivotal for those advocating equal rights for gays, and many legal experts predict that the Supreme Court will overturn the law.

When Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, commented on the case, he angered gays of all political stripes by likening homosexuality to incest and bigamy. Gay Republicans, however, say the remark emboldened them, giving them new leverage on party leaders.

But leaders of conservative and Christian groups, angry at what they say is the president's tepid defense of Mr. Santorum, assert that they will use the court's decision to demand that Mr. Bush, who is on record as opposing gay marriage, take a more vocal stand.

"Candidate Bush said in the second debate that he felt marriage was a sacred covenant, limited to a man and a woman," said Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, an advocacy group in Washington. "That was not a huge issue in 2000. Mark it down. It will be a big, big issue in 2004."

Mr. Connor and other conservatives say they are incensed over a March meeting between Marc Racicot, the Republican national chairman, who is expected to become Mr. Bush's campaign chairman, and the Human Rights Campaign, a nonpartisan group that advocates equal rights for gays. The session was the first time a Republican Party chairman had met with the group, said David Smith, its spokesman.

Mr. Connor recently sent an e-mail message to his supporters questioning whether the party chairman, whom he described as "out of touch with George W. Bush's most loyal and committed voters," was fit for the campaign job.

Leaders of socially conservative and Christian groups also demanded — and got — their own meeting with Mr. Racicot. Participants said they told the Republican chairman they would bolt the party if leaders continued to make overtures toward gays.

"The main message that we delivered was that you are playing with political fire if you are seen to be in any way compromising with the homosexual lobby," said Paul M. Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, who was present.

Mr. Racicot declined to be interviewed.

Charlie Black, a Republican strategist, said Mr. Bush "understands the old Reagan rule, which is somebody who supports me 80 percent of the time is my 80 percent friend and not my 20 percent enemy."

Still, Mr. Bush is walking a difficult line, and advocates for gay rights say that while he talks about inclusion, his record is mixed.

As president, Mr. Bush has appointed several openly gay people, including Michael Guest, the ambassador to Romania, to high-level jobs, and he has also declined to overturn executive orders issued by President Bill Clinton that bar discrimination against gays in federal employment and security clearances. Mr. Bush's effort to triple federal spending on the global AIDS epidemic has brought him praise from many gays.

But Mr. Bush does not favor giving gays the legal protection that would grant their domestic partners health and tax benefits, and he is against rolling back the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, under which gays can be expelled if they disclose their sexual orientation.

"They have not taken steps forward, but they have not taken steps backward," Mr. Smith said of Bush officials.

Mr. Bush made a calculated decision in his 2000 election campaign to reach out to gays by meeting with a select group of gay Republicans.

The meeting was arranged by Charles Francis, a friend of the Bush family who is gay. "People talked about gay siblings, they talked about gay marriage, they talked about H.I.V./AIDS," said Mr. Francis, who has since founded the Republican Unity Coalition, a group of prominent Republicans, including former President Gerald R. Ford, dedicated to making sexual orientation a nonissue in the Republican Party.

At the suggestion of the group, Mr. Bush invited Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona, the only openly gay Republican in Congress, to speak at the party's national convention that August. In his speech, though, Mr. Kolbe made no mention of his sexual orientation. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, estimates a million people who identify themselves as gay voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. While that is hardly a vast voter block, other Republicans are also doing the arithmetic, among them Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon.

Like President Bush, Senator Smith opposes gay marriage and requiring benefits for domestic partners. But he is promoting legislation to permit hate crime prosecutors to consider the victim's sexual orientation, a stance that won him the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign in his last Senate race.

Though he has faced threats from conservatives, Mr. Smith said, "I gained more votes than I lost."