Burning down the Log Cabin

Assailing the "cabal of geniuses" who cooked up the gay marriage ban, one of the GOP's only openly gay leaders breaks with his party.

By Eric Boehlert

June 3, 2004 | President Bush's decision to support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage continues to have unintended consequences inside the Republican Party. The latest fallout came last Thursday when the openly gay District of Columbia councilmember David Catania, who is credited with pumping new energy into the often dormant Republican Party in Washington, resigned his leadership position after the party chairman refused to certify Catania as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Catania remains, for now, a registered Republican, but he says he will not vote for Bush.

"I've spent six and a half years trying to build this local party," Catania told Salon. "This was not an easy decision or one I came to lightly. But in the end I just couldn't see any way I could stay."

D.C. Republican Party chairwoman Betsy Werronen, along with other party leaders, according to the Washington Blade, a gay weekly, had "picked Catania and other local gay Republicans to run on an uncontested slate of delegates and alternate delegates to the Republican Convention in New York City in late August. D.C. Republicans elected the slate at a party caucus that same month. Werronen also appointed Catania to represent the D.C. GOP convention delegation on the party's national platform committee."

After Bush moved to support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Catania announced that he would not support Bush for reelection. On Thursday, Werronen, who had described Catania as a "shining star" of the Republican Party, stripped him of his delegation status. He then walked away from his D.C. party leadership position, fed up with the national party apparatus and what he calls "this cabal of [Republican] geniuses who have cooked up ways to exclude Americans."

It's a painful separation for someone who was personally summoned to Austin, Texas, in 2000 to share some face time with candidate Bush. During the primaries Bush refused to meet with the openly gay Log Cabin Republicans, who had endorsed his rival, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. But after effectively securing the nomination, and anxious to bolster his "compassionate conservative" credentials, Bush in April 2000 invited a handpicked group of 12 gay activists to his Texas campaign headquarters. Designated a GOP "Maverick" for being under 40 and raising more than $50,000 for Bush, Catania was among the so-called Austin 12. Thanks in part to their hard work, Bush won 25 percent of the gay vote in 2000, or 1 million votes, according to exit polls.

A white councilman in a city whose population is 75 percent minority -- and a Republican elected official in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 9 to 1, Catania is used to operating as the odd man out. But he says the Republican Party, and specifically the form it takes during reelection mode, has become intolerable for gays. "The fact of the matter is, there ain't no there there anymore," says Catania.

Meanwhile, the White House's hardball approach to gay marriage (none of the Austin 12 were consulted on the matter) has created additional tension in Washington's gay community, with some wondering privately whether any closeted gays are working for Bush and his anti-gay-marriage agenda. As the Washington Blade noted, "Gay political organizations, both partisan and nonpartisan, have so far declined to formally reprimand the Bush campaign on its lack of diversity. Yet, many gay Republicans, including some at Log Cabin, insist that there is in fact gay representation at the top level of the operation. But in an attempt to avoid an '80s-style outing campaign against prominent members of the party, members of Log Cabin and the Austin 12 have refused to divulge any information about the lives of Bush's closeted staffers."

In an interview on Monday, Catania described the simmering controversy.

About the events of last week, I know you had expressed your displeasure with the Republican platform regarding gay marriage, but were you surprised in the end that your delegation status was taken away?

This was the act of a single person, the chairman of the party [in Washington]. In fact, we had a delegation meeting not too long ago when she first raised the issue that she was going to do this to me, and there was a lot of pushback from the delegation. If this had been a vote of the delegation, she would never have succeeded with this. She, in an arbitrary way, simply has made a singular decision that she would not certify me.

Next page: "Certainly no one -- I'm not an imbecile -- wants their delegates breaking rank"