Harold Ford's New Gay
Marriage Problem
By Shawn Zeller,
NYTimes on the Web, January 22, 2007
Tennessee Democrat Harold E. Ford Jr.
can never quite get on the most opportune side of the culture wars.
Last year, he gave up his Memphis congressional seat to try for the Senate, and
lost after the release of perhaps the most notorious attack ad of the 2006
campaign, which suggested that Ford fraternized with Playboy models and
pornography producers. Now that he’s on course to become chairman of the
Democratic Leadership Council, Ford is getting flak from the National Stonewall
Democrats, an advocacy group named for the Greenwich Village bar where the
modern gay rights movement was launched in 1969, for his opposition to same-sex
marriage.
Ford cast one of only 36 Democratic votes in the House in 2004, and one of only
34 last year, for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The
Stonewall group finds those votes all the more upsetting, spokesman John Marble
maintains, because before the 2004 vote Ford had privately assured gay and
lesbian Democrats in Tennessee that he did not support the same-sex amendment.
He made no such assurances in last year’s campaign against Republican Bob
Corker. Ford ran ads that explicitly contradicted Corker spots describing
Ford as a backer of gay marriage. And when the New Jersey Supreme Court
ruled in October that same-sex couples in the state are due the same rights and
benefits as married heterosexuals, Ford demurred. “I oppose gay marriage,”
he said. “This November, there’s a referendum on the Tennessee ballot to
ban same-sex marriage — I am voting for it.”
Ford’s position was “very belittling to gay and lesbian families,” Marble says,
even though it was in tune with the public: The referendum carried 81
percent of the vote. Marble argues that the outcome would have been
closer, except that Ford insisted that the state Democratic Party avoid working
with the proposal’s opponents.
Neither Ford nor the DLC responded to multiple requests for comment.
The DLC has typically avoided comment on gay marriage — while also lambasting
the GOP for its stance on the issue. In a 2004 e-mail to members, the DLC
attacked President Bush for the “socially divisive, morally questionable and
politically dangerous” decision to raise the issue in his re-election campaign.
Marble says his group isn’t calling for Ford to be rebuffed by the DLC — just
publicizing a contradictory track record that amounts to “a cheap political
ploy.” As for the DLC, he says, “We would hope they clarify their
position.”
And then there’s Tennessee politics: Democrats there are keen for Ford to
seek a statewide office soon.
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