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All Ready
For First Presidential
LGBT
Forum
by
365Gay.com from the Web, August 8, 2007
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Los Angeles, California -- The
podium is ready. The final sound checks have been made. The
candidates will soon arrive in Los Angeles. And America -- especially gay
America -- is preparing to tune in Thursday night to the first ever televised
forum by presidential candidates exclusively on LGBT issues.
There also will be a studio audience.
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson,
and Mike Gravel all will participate in the groundbreaking forum.
Chris Dodd and Joe Biden will be absent due to scheduling conflicts.
The forum, which will take place in Los Angeles, will be broadcast on LGBT
television network LOGO at 9:00 pm ET (6:00 pm PT) and through live streaming
video on our blog site
VisibleVote08.com.
LOGO is the owner of 365Gay.com.
The forum also will be archived at
VisibleVote08.com
so that people unable to watch it live can still see it.
Asking questions of the candidates will be a panel comprised of journalists
Jonathan Capehart and Margaret Carlson, musician/activist Melissa Etheridge and
Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solomonese.
Many of those questions come from the national gay community itself.
Nearly 4,000 questions have been posed to the candidates through
VisibleVote08.com.
"There wasn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of question," HRC spokesperson Brad Luna
told 365Gay.com yesterday.
"People who are in same-sex relationships asked about national recognition of
partnerships, people who had health care concerns asked about getting their
partners on health insurance, vets and active service members asked about Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell," said Luna.
Los Angeles was chosen as the site for the event because of the state’s early
primary election, on February 5th, 2008.
Each of the Democrats will appear separately, each having 15-minutes for
questioning but never sharing the stage with one another.
All of the Democratic candidates support adding sexuality to the list of
categories in federal hate crime law. The all support a bill to ban
anti-gay job discrimination, repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and civil unions.
Only two, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, are
on record supporting gay marriage.
While most LGBT rights activists are critical of the lack of support for
same-sex marriage by the major candidates, openly gay Rep. Barney Frank
(D-Mass.) says he understands their caution.
"It's not wrong for people trying to become president to take political
considerations into account," Frank told the Associated Press. "I don't
want a bunch of martyrs on my side."
A similar debate was offered to the GOP candidates but none agreed to
participate, LOGO said.
The LGBT vote is considered a decisive electoral force and according to exit
poll data makes up approximately 4 percent of the voting population.
A survey taken by an LGBT marking company and released Wednesday shows that gay
and lesbian consumers are far more likely to have voted in the last presidential
and midterm elections than the population in general.
Significant numbers of both gay men and lesbians also donated to a political
party in the past year. The survey also found that despite significant
social and political progress over the past decade, majorities of both gays and
lesbians believe homosexuality will remain a “divisive” issue in ten years.
The survey results are part of the Gay Consumer Index and the Lesbian Consumer
Index taken for Community Marketing Inc.
The join surveys questioned more than 12,000 gay Americans and 10,000 lesbian
Americans this spring.
"The results of the Gay Consumer Index and Lesbian Consumer Index studies
demonstrate that the political parties would be smart to pay attention to the
issues that mean the most to gay and lesbian voters," said Tom Roth, president
of Community Marketing Inc. in a statement.
"We have far more at stake than the average voter and we’re therefore far more
engaged in the political process."
More than 92 percent of gay male respondents reported that they voted in the
2004 presidential election with nearly 84 percent reporting that they voted in
the mid-term election in 2006.
Results for lesbians were similar with nearly 91 percent of lesbian respondents
reporting that they voted in the 2004 presidential election and 78 percent
saying that they voted in the mid-term election in 2006.
By comparison, media reports estimate that 64 percent of the general population
voted in the 2004 presidential election and just 40 percent in the 2006 mid-term
election.
A separate study, by Quinnipiac University, however, shows that it does not
matter to most voters in general in three key states whether a presidential
candidate has the backing of LGBT civil rights groups.
The Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll, also released on Wednesday, looked
at general voters in three swing states -- Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
In Ohio, 54 percent of those questioned said endorsements by LGBT groups would
make no difference to how they vote. Thirty-four percent said it would
make them less likely to support a candidate and 10 percent said it would make
them more likely to back a campaign.
"Being perceived as the candidate of gay rights turns off more voters than it
attracts, although in general being considered the candidate of a special
interest group seems to be a political loser overall," said Peter Brown, the
assistant director of Quinnipiac's polling division.
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