HOMOPHOBIC CAMPAIGNS BACKFIRE IN THE CAROLINAS
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By Lightning A. Brown
Political strategists and campaign planners who
predicted big wins for “dean” campaigns this year
came out the victors in the Carolinas and elsewhere
as votes were counted in the 1986 general elections
for U.S. Senate and House and for state offices.
And unlike the political bloodbath of 1984, public
rejection of hate campaigns at the polls was
reflected in an absence of election-year violence
and harassment against gays.
“Clean campaigns” were not the only
campaigns run, however. In Senate races in South
and Neath Carolina, gay-baiting directly or
indirectly marked the strategies of losing
candidates Henry McMaster and Jim Broyhill,
both Republicans. Nearly half of the ten North
Carolina congressional races involved appeals to
“gay issues” as defined by conservative strategists
— AIDS, pornography, the national Gay Rights
Bill, and “Bible prindples.”
HoUings Supportive
In South Carolina, incumbent Democratic
Senator Ernest Hollings weathered a challenge
from Republican Henry McMaster which hit hard
on Hollings’ co-sponsorship of S.430, the Senate
Gay Rights Bill. “This gay rights legislation that
Fritz Hollings sponsored would give homosexuals,
that is the gay community, special privilege in the
1964 Qivil Rights Act along with other minorities,”
McMaster’s campaign chairman David Thomas
charged. “Sen. Hollings is actually working, not for
the people of South Carolina, but for certain
segments located in and around the San Francisco
area,” Thomas said.
Hollings’ spokespersons defused the charges try
taking them head on, denouncing them as part of a
“dirty tricks, negative campaign”, and defending
Hollings’ support for gay and lesbian civil rights.
The campaign issued a position paper on the Gay
Rights Bill, which read in part, “Hollings has never
favored preferential treatment for anyone or any
group of people, and he opposes quotas. But he
does believe that the Bill of Rights and the
Constitution were intended for all of our citizens.”
South Carolina voters decided by a margin of
over 200,000, which netted the Democrat 64% of
the vote, that Hollings is in step with his state. It was
a victory for inclusive politics and an important
Southern endorsement for S.430.
Sanford v. Broyhill
In the wake of the bitter and vicious campaign
feud between Jim Hunt and Jesse Helms in 1984,
North Carolina voters were also clearly sick of
“dirty tricks” politics. Those candidates who
ignored the public’s distaste for negative
emotionalism almost universally lost their
elections. And even in races where negative tactics
were carried out through “unofficial, non
campaign” committees such as The Freedom
Council and Citizens for a Conservative Court,
negative messages tended to bring down the
Republican candidates they were intended to re
elect — Senator Jim Broyhill and Chief Justice
Rhoda Billings.
In the Jim Broyhill campaign, the N.C. Freedom
Council (the state chapter of an organization
founded by evangelist/ politician Pat Robertson),
attempted to nurture anti-gay sentiments as a
campaign issue without involving the candidate
directly in the debate. But the indirect approach
failed to bring out finicky Fundamentalist voters,
who were not impressed with Broyhill’s voting
record against abortion rights and gay/lesbian
issues in Congress and regarded him as too
moderate. “You can’t put a moderate Republican
up against that kind of thing and expect to win,”
said Roanoke Bible College professor Rev. C.
Barry McCarty, who is also state Social Services
Commission chair. “You’ve got to give the Down
to have turned out their vote, and blamed
weaknesses in the Broyhill campaign for the
Republican loss. New York Times exit polls in
North Carolina indicated that Fundamentalists
represented around 11 percent of those voting.
Pat Robertson’s Freedom Councils mailed out
10,000 letters saying that Broyhill had taken the
“right” stance on such issues as “pornography, gay
rights, and abortion”, and on appointment of
conservative judges to federal courts. A group of
Fundamentalist activists, including Rev. Kent
Kelly of Southern Pines and Rev. Thomas Vestal of
Raleigh mailed at least 9,000 brochures to
Christian leaders damning Senator-elect Terry
Sanford for supporting the United Nations and
disarmament. The National Right to Life
Committee also did “unofficial non-campaign”
mailings for Broyhill, and loaned his campaign a
political consultant to aid the Republican in
Only “Normal” Violence
! The relatively restrained 1986 campaigns were
accompanied by another sort of respite for gay men
and lesbians. In contrast to the all-out attacks
against gay people (and purportedly gay
sympathetic candidates) in 1984, which coincided
with police roundups of gay men in Raleigh,
Charlotte, and Greensboro, with arson of one gay
bookstore, and with nine brutal murders or
attempted murders, violence and harassment
against the gay community remained at “normal”
levels. Protests against entrapment campaigns in
Wilmington and Greensboro, and agaipst official
job discrimination policies in Charlotte also
appeared to gain greater public support than two
years ago. (In Raleigh, the District Attorney who
engineered the 1984 gay roundups lost his bid for
reelection in the June Democratic run-off
primary.)
The so-called “Gay Rights Platform,” which has never been proposed or
adopted by any gay liberation group in this country, is frequently cited
by Fundamentalist groups in their anti-gay campaigns.
East conservative Democrats a reason to cross
over...” Other Fundamentalist organizers claimed
courting conservative crossover voters.
The Democratic campaign of Terry Sanford
ignored the “unofficial” anti-gay attacks from the
Broyhill campaign, except for blanket appeals to
“decent campaigning” and “common sense”. As a
result, Sanford managed to define the issues on
which Broyhill was forced to run — trade policy
for textiles, farm supports, and environmental/
nuclear issues — questions for which Broyhill’s
bland style could generate little excitement.
(The National Congressional Club, Jesse Helms’
powerful organization, mostly stayed out of the
Broyhill-Sanford race. Their candidate, David
Funderburk, was rejected by Republican primary
voters for his negative tactics this Spring. Instead,
they focused their faff election activities around
supporting Senator Jeremiah Denton in Alabama.
Denton lost to Democrat Richard C. Shelby, who
was backed by “big union bosses, Jesse- Jackson
type activists and gay rights supporters,” according
to one of ten Congressional Club fund-raising
letters sent out for the election. Shelby’s coalition
carried just over 50% of the Alabama vote. The
defeat of Congressional Club candidates was
similar to the 1982 off-year elections, in which all
five Club- endorsed candidates were defeated. The
Congressional Club reported spending around $8.5
million on the election, roughly half of Helms’
1984 budget.)
Triangle Races
In N.C. Congressional races, political gay
baiting backfired for conservative candidates four
districts. Republican candidates Bill Cobey,
Howard Moye, Stu Epperson, Bud McElhaney
took their party’s 1984 anti-gay platform plank to
heart and emphasized opposition to gay rights in
their campaigns. All were defeated by Democrats
who emphasized decent, moderate campaigning
and who espoused decent, moderate stands.
Most outspoken against the gay community
were the campaigns of two Triangle area
Congressional candidates. Bill Cobey and Bud
McElhaney, whose districts include the Raleigh
Durham-Chapel Hill area. In both cases, according
to election day exit interviews, voters concluded
that the conservative campaigns were too extreme
on various religious and social topics. Among
these, homophobic appeals on issues such as AIDS,
pornography, and "traditional Bible values"
appear to have been important in defining what
was “too extreme”.
Anti-gay tactics were meet bizarre in Durham’s
2nd District, where Republican challenger Bud
McElhaney accused conservative Democratic
incumbent Tim Valentine of supporting federal
funding for gay pornography. The Republican
candidate charged that “publishing companies of
homosexual material” were being funded through
the National Endowment for the Arts. McElhaney,
who formerly owned a Christian bookstore and
ran a Fundamentalist church school, promised to
stop expenditure of tax money for any publications
or writers which support gay lifestyles.
Attacking Valentine’s vote in favor of the
Washington, D.C. AIDS Anti-Discrimination Bill,
McElhaney also charged that Valentine was “in
favor of AIDS,” a claim which Valentine ridiculed.
Valentine received the greatest majority of any
Congressional winner, over 70% of an electorate
composed of progressive urban voters, blacks and
rural white conservatives to whom McElhaney’s
anti-gay tactics may have seemed uncalled for and
out of place.
(Valentine, for his part, is no supporter for gay
rights. In 1984, the congressman told reporters that
the problem with the national Democractic Party
was that it pandered to people with “strange
romantic preferences.”)
It was the second loss this year for McElhaney,
one of two Republican candidates who joined in
the failed attempt this summer to oust Durham
mayor Wib Gulley for his Gay Pride Week
proclamation. The recall petition against the mayor
had been widely regarded as an election stunt,
although one of great significance, both for the
progressive victors and for the Republican/
Fundamentalist coalition which lost both the recall
drive and the election itself.
Last-minute attempts by unidentified groups or
individuals to resurrect the “gay issue” in Durham
through a spurious poster campaign and a series of
letters to the editor “exposing” election
endorsements by a non-existent “Gay and Lesbian
Solidarity” group also failed when local papers
refused to cover the hoax, or printed disclaimers
with letters that did appear. One letter, from a
Mary-Elise Haug, called the idea of gay political
endorsements “immoral and disgusting” and
advocated “To prevent a gross perversion of
traditional family structure and the further spread
of AIDS, we the people of North America have
one solution — vote Republican.” No Republicans
were elected m uurnam.
In Raleigh’s 4th Congressional District, another
eleventh- hour attempt to stir up anti-gay
emotionalism also backfired. At an election-eve
press conference held by Republican Congressman
Bill Cobey, conservative Democrat David J.
Martin, a Cobey supporter, denounced Cobey’s
opponent, David Price, for espousing “anti
biblical” views and being lenient toward “the
godless homosexuals.” Martin also told reporters at
the news conference that Price, as executive
director of a national Democratic rules
commission in 1984, had given special privileges to
gay Democrats in planning for the 1984
Democratic national convention in San Francisco.
The Cobey news conference, which was
reported in election day newspaper editions, was
the third time during the campaign that
homophobic tactics backfired against candidate
Cobey, resulting in voters' identifying him as a
religious extremist. On the Sunday before the
election, a group of Baptist ministers publicly
protested the Republican campaign’s distribution
of political brochures containing anti-gay material
on car windshields during morning services, and
condemned Cobey for improperly mixing politics
and religion. Earlier, in September, widespread
public criticism forced Cobey to apologize for
mailing a fund-raising letter in which the candidate
had identified himself as an “ambassador for
Christ” and criticized his opponent as “not willing
to take a strong stand for the principles outlined in
the Word of God.”
Cobey, a vocal Fundamentalist, did not follow
Broyhill’s lead in distancing himself from these
anti-gay tactics. After the Martin outburst, for
example, Cobey expressed support for the attack,
saying “He's speaking, of course, on his own. He
has a right to say anything he wants to. He made a
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Serving Lesbians and Gay Men in the Carolinas Since 1979