[OutVoice] Article on Gay political influence

[Gordon P. Smith]

My dad sent me this article. Particularly poignant in light of our
devastating loss in California.

 

Here are the broken links:

This article:
<http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1854884,00.html>
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1854884,00.html

Why gay marriage was defeated in CA:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1856872,00.html

 

I'd heard that the Mormons were largely responsible for mobilizing the yes
votes on Prop 8; this confirms it.



Time Magazine

Friday, Oct. 31, 2008

The Gay Mafia That's Redefining Liberal Politics

By John Cloud / Beverly Hills

A few weeks before Virginia's legislative elections in 2005, a researcher
working on behalf of a clandestine group of wealthy, gay political donors
telephoned a Virginia legislator named Adam Ebbin. Then, as now, Ebbin was
the only openly gay member of the state's general assembly. The researcher
wanted Ebbin's advice on how the men he represented could spend their
considerable funds to help defeat anti-gay Virginia politicians.

Ebbin, a Democrat who is now 44, was happy to oblige. (Full disclosure: in
the mid-'90s, Ebbin and I knew each other briefly as colleagues; he sold ads
for Washington City Paper, a weekly where I was a reporter.) Using Ebbin's
expertise, the gay donors - none of whom live in Virginia - began
contributing to certain candidates in the state. There were five
benefactors: David Bohnett of Beverly Hills, Calif., who in 1999 sold the
company he had co-founded, Geo-Cities, to Yahoo! in a deal worth $5 billion
on the day it was announced; Timothy Gill of Denver, another tech
multimillionaire; James Hormel of San Francisco, grandson of George, who
founded the famous meat company; Jon Stryker of Kalamazoo, Mich., the
billionaire grandson of the founder of medical-technology giant Stryker
Corp.; and Henry van Ameringen, whose father Arnold Louis van Ameringen
started a Manhattan-based import company that later became the mammoth
International Flavors & Fragrances.

The five men spent $138,000 in Virginia that autumn, according to state
records compiled by the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project. Of that,
$48,000 went directly to the candidates Ebbin recommended. Ebbin got $45,000
for his PAC, the Virginia Progress Fund, so he could give to the candidates
himself. Another $45,000 went to Equality Virginia, a gay-rights group that
was putting money into many of the same races.

On Election Day that year, the Virginia legislature stayed solidly in
Republican hands; the Democratic Party netted just one seat. But that larger
outcome masked an intriguing development: anti-gay conservatives had
suffered considerably. For instance, in northern Virginia, a Democrat named
Charles Caputo (who received $6,500 from Ebbin's PAC) had beaten a Christian
youth minister, Chris Craddock, by an unexpectedly large margin, with a vote
of 56% to 41%. Three other candidates critical of gays were also defeated,
including delegate Richard Black, who had long opposed gay equality in
Richmond. Black had had no single donation as large as the $20,000 that
Ebbin's PAC gave his opponent. "This was my ninth election campaign, and it
wasn't unusual to have homosexuals involved," says Black, who now practices
law. "But it was different, certainly, in degree. There had not been a
concerted influx of money from homosexuals as a group before."

The group that donated the money to use against Black and the others is
known as the Cabinet, although you won't find that name on a letterhead or
even on the Internet. Aside from Bohnett, 52; Gill, 55; Hormel, 75; Stryker,
50; and Van Ameringen, 78, the other members of the Cabinet are Jonathan
Lewis (49-year-old grandson of Joseph, co-founder of Progressive Insurance)
and Linda Ketner, 58, heiress to the Food Lion fortune, who is running for
Congress against GOP Representative Henry Brown Jr. of South Carolina.

Ketner's is something of a long-shot bid - her district has been reliably
Republican for years - but recently Congressional Quarterly described her
"suddenly strong run" against Brown as "the biggest surprise" in this year's
House races. Ketner, who was invited to join the all-male Cabinet as a way
of diversifying it, declined to discuss her role in the group.

Among gay activists, the Cabinet is revered as a kind of secret gay Super
Friends, a homosexual justice league that can quietly swoop in wherever
anti-gay candidates are threatening and finance victories for the good guys.
Rumors abound in gay political circles about the group's recondite
influence; some of the rumors are even true. For instance, the Cabinet met
in California last year with two sitting governors, Brian Schweitzer of
Montana and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, both Democrats; political advisers
who work for the Cabinet met with a third Democratic governor, Wisconsin's
Jim Doyle. The Cabinet has also funded a secretive organization called the
Movement Advancement Project (MAP), which a veteran lesbian activist
describes as the "Gay IRS." MAP keeps tabs on the major gay organizations to
make sure they are operating efficiently. The October 2008 MAP report notes,
for example, that the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force fails to meet Better
Business Bureau standards for limiting overhead expenses.

According to the online databases Opensecrets.org and Followthemoney.org,
the seven members of the Cabinet have spent at least $7.8 million on
political races since the beginning of 2004, although their true level of
giving is doubtless far higher, since Followthemoney.org - which is run by
the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics - does not
capture all contributions to PACs (for instance, the Cabinet money that went
to Ebbin's PAC in 2005 doesn't show up on the website). The Cabinet spends
at least as much each election cycle as does the PAC run by the Human Rights
Campaign, the world's largest gay political group. And yet the Cabinet has
operated in stealth, without accountability from watchdogs. (The Cabinet
does not subject itself to MAP analysis.)

Cabinet spending shows up in races all over the country where pro-gay
candidates have a good shot. For instance, Bohnett, Gill and Van Ameringen
have given $143,000 this year to New York Democrats, who are within two
seats of controlling the state senate. A Democratic New York legislature
would likely approve equal marriage rights. (Read "Why Gay Marriage Was
Defeated in California.")

The Cabinet's Gill and Stryker have seen their money achieve remarkable
results in their respective states, Colorado and Michigan. Stateline.org (a
project of the Pew Charitable Trusts) reported that in 2006, Stryker gave
"at least $6.4 million to candidates or political committees in at least a
dozen states, including Michigan, where he can boast that Democrats gained a
majority in the state house for the first time in 12 years." Some Cabinet
members also donated tens of thousands of dollars in certain Iowa and New
Hampshire races in 2006, when Democrats regained control of both states'
legislatures. Those states' Democratic majorities now ensure that, among
other things, efforts to amend the Iowa and New Hampshire constitutions to
ban same-sex marriage will fail.

And yet the Cabinet is noteworthy not only because its treasure begets
political influence but also because its very existence shows how
dramatically the culture wars - and liberal politics as a whole - have
changed in the past decade. Next summer gays will celebrate the 40th
anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the 1969 Manhattan demonstrations that
began when cross-dressers angry about police raids at the Stonewall bar
began throwing bottles and punches. Today, though, the street movement is
basically defunct. And increasingly, the center of gay power is moving out
from Washington toward the interior - toward powerful foundations like those
run by Stryker in Kalamazoo and Gill in Denver. Since the beginning of 2001,
Stryker's foundation, which is called Arcus and has offices in both the U.S.
and the U.K., has given away $67 million, about three-quarters to gays and
about one-quarter to apes. (Stryker, who got a pet monkey as a gift when he
was young, is a major donor to the conservation of ape habitats.)

The Cabinet is emblematic of a larger shift on the left since 2004 in the
direction of big-money politics, a shift most clearly seen in Barack Obama's
refusal of public financing for his campaign. The Cabinet is only one of
several flush, members-only liberal groups that have formed since 2004, the
most famous (and richest) being the Democracy Alliance, whose sponsors
include billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis (father of Cabinet member
Jonathan) and Pat Stryker (sister of Cabinet member Jon).

That raises questions: What does a civil rights movement look like in an era
of massive wealth? Can you still inspire a grass-roots movement when all the
street troops know that the billionaires can just write bigger checks? And
is it possible that the left has become a movement as coldly obsessed with
money as it always assumed the right was?

Gays may see the cabinet as powerful, almost numinous, but its own members
see themselves as largely unorganized and highly independent. "It's a group
of people who like and respect each other and their opinions," Ray Mulliner,
a longtime Hormel adviser, told me recently. "It's nothing more than
like-minded donors getting together to share strategies." When I mentioned
that similar organizations on the right had received press scrutiny - I was
thinking of the Arlington Group, a coalition of movement conservatives -
Mulliner angrily rejected the comparison: "You have no reason to be curious
about this. You're going to write a piece that's going to start a fire that
needs to get put out, and it's going to cost a lot of money to put it out,"
he said.

The Cabinet first came together three or four years ago, according to Van
Ameringen, as a "meeting place" for donors who wanted to use their money
with greater strategic acumen. Gill got the idea for the group after he and
Lewis attended a Democracy Alliance meeting. The donors felt they could
accomplish more for gays if they shared information rather than operate as
"silo" givers. Some members were frustrated that the established gay
movement in Washington hadn't made greater progress in a society rapidly
coming to see homosexuality as a mere variation rather than a moral
degeneration.

Today it's difficult to find a gay organization that has not enjoyed the
Cabinet's largesse. In 2007, for example, Stryker's Arcus Foundation gave
away $11.8 million as part of its Gay and Lesbian Program. The money reached
both big-name groups like the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
(which got half a million dollars) and little organizations like the Actors
Theatre Co. of Grand Rapids, Mich., which got $25,000 to produce a play
called Seven Passages: The Story of Gay Christians.

The web of connections among the Cabinet members is complex. All the other
members have donated the maximum amount allowed to Ketner's congressional
campaign. Gill, Lewis and Stryker employ political advisers - respectively,
Denver attorney Ted Trimpa; Paul Yandura, who worked in the Clinton White
House's political-affairs office; and Lisa Turner, a former political
director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee - who regularly
speak with one another and with others who work for Cabinet members.

There's nothing illegal about the Cabinet's coordination of its members'
giving, according to Lawrence Noble, campaign-finance expert with the
Washington-based firm Skadden, Arps. The contributions would be illegal only
if the members agreed to give up control of their donations entirely or
coordinated them directly with a campaign. There's no evidence of either;
several people associated with the Cabinet made clear that its members make
their donations without anyone's review. And yet as the National Review's
Byron York has pointed out, Americans were horrified to learn during
Watergate that Richard Nixon's friend Clement Stone had donated an
outrageous $2 million in cash to the President's campaign. Cabinet members
have spent at least five times that amount in various races in the past four
years; the Soros-backed Democracy Alliance has spent probably 50 times that
amount.

Still, it's hard to argue that the left in general and gays in particular
should sit on their hands while foes outspend them. Strategically, the
Cabinet makes sense; most people who defend its secrecy offer a
Machiavellian understanding of ends and means. "I could lose a lot of sleep
about it, and I do wonder why they have abandoned [gay] organizations that
have a 35-year track record in order to have their own operations," says a
seasoned Washington gay activist. "But if that's the way the rules of the
game are being played, I need to maneuver within what the realities are."

The larger question is what role wealthy groups like the Cabinet will have
in reshaping the politics of the left. There's been a great deal of (largely
self-congratulatory) talk among liberals about the progressive movement's
success in using new technologies to harness the netroots, to use the
fashionable liberal argot. But there has been less reflection about what
impact the great gobs of Sorosian money will have on the movement. Michael
Fleming, a Los Angeles political macher who advises Cabinet member Bohnett,
worries that rank-and-file gay people - the ones who might have picked up a
rock at Stonewall - are increasingly relying on billionaires to cut checks.
"Where is the outrage?" he asks.

The answer is that outrage has given way to smugness, the kind of
self-satisfaction conservatives displayed after electoral successes in 1980
and 1994. Groups like the Cabinet and the Democracy Alliance suggest a new
kind of moneyed progressivism, one that shows little of the class discontent
that animated earlier strains of leftist thought. Is this a sign of
maturation - throwing off radical excesses - or capitulation, a surrendering
to the idea that efforts to reduce the power of money in our democracy have
failed? Probably a little of both.

For its part, the Cabinet seems poised to prod the gay movement into being
sleeker, faster, more tactical. When the remaining veterans of Stonewall
march down Fifth Avenue next summer, those shimmeringly romantic, slightly
foolish days of 1969 will have never seemed so distant.