Washington Blade - January 16, 2009
Lou Chibbaro Jr.

That's the assessment of a number of key players in the gay and transgender civil rights movement - Democrats and Republicans - who observed the Bush administration and Congress over the past eight years.

Gay Democrats tended to be harsher in their assessment of the Bush administration than gay Republicans.

But even gay GOP activists acknowledged that the president's strong support for a U.S. constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage - which activists said would have enshrined anti-gay discrimination in the nation's most sacred document - crossed a line that made Bush an enemy of gay equality.

"Unfortunately, history will remember President Bush for his effort to push for the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment," said Patrick Sammon, president of the national gay group Log Cabin Republicans.

"It's unfortunate that he decided to make a political decision going into 2004 to use gay and lesbian people as a tool to win re-election," Sammon said. "Certainly, I think that overshadows in a very negative way everything else that happened during his administration."

John Marble, spokesperson for National Stonewall Democrats, a gay advocacy group, said Bush's support for the Federal Marriage Amendment was "just the tip of the iceberg" in a litany of anti-gay positions taken by the Bush administration.

Marble points to Bush's opposition to nearly every gay civil rights bill pending in Congress during his eight years in office, including the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would authorize the federal government to prosecute hate crimes targeting gays and transgender people.

Gay Democratic and Republican activists have also expressed concern that Bush has threatened to veto the Shepard hate crimes measure and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, which calls for banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

They note that Republican congressional leaders have used the president's veto threats to bolster their efforts to block the hate crimes bill and ENDA, even though a bipartisan majority of Republican and Democratic lawmakers have expressed support for the two bills.

"These things would have passed if we had a president who supported them," Marble said. "I think it's safe to say his record on GLBT issues is not only bad, it's destructive."

Other gay Republicans, including D.C. Republican Party Chair Bob Kabel, point to what they say have been a series of positive actions by Bush that broke new ground on gay rights for a Republican president.

They note that Bush made several high-level gay appointments, including gay career Foreign Service official Michael Guest as U.S. ambassador to Romania and two gay men to direct the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. At the time Bush named gay GOP activist Scott Evertz and gay physician Joseph O'Neill as successive heads of the White House AIDS office, those holding the position were considered the government's "AIDS czar."

Bush also followed a precedent set by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in naming several gays to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, known as PACHA. o Sammon and Kabel said the Bush administration's creation of the highly-praised U.S. global AIDS relief program would be remembered as the administration's most successful effort on AIDS. But the two said that while the president clearly cares about AIDS everywhere, the administration's domestic AIDS prevention programs fell short of their expectations.

Kabel and gay Republican activist Carl Schmid, who were among the PACHA members appointed by Bush, said the Bush administration appointed as many as 75 or more gays to other high-level administration jobs. But the two declined to identity most of them, saying the administration had a policy of naming qualified people to government posts without making an issue of their sexual orientation.

"I think the names were not made public because this points out the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans," Kabel said. "Democrats will have a list of Hispanics, a list of gays, a list of blacks.

"Republicans don't do that. I think what the Bush administration did is exactly what you want, which is to make it a non-issue," Kabel said. "They didn't care whether you were gay or straight as long as you were the right person for the job."

Other activists, including some gay Republicans, disputed Kabel's assessment. They said things began as Kabel described them during the first two or three years of Bush's first term in office. Then, according to gay GOP critics of Bush, the administration appeared to take a dramatic turn against gay rights as the president's 2004 re-election campaign began to take shape.

To most gay Republicans, signs of the potential for Bush becoming a gay-supportive Republican president surfaced during Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, when he met with a dozen gay Republican activists at his Austin, Tex., campaign office. Those who met with him became known as the Austin 12.

Although he made no specific commitments to back gay rights legislation, Bush told people at the gathering that he respected their views and hoped to continue his dialogue with them after he became president. In a comment that gay Republicans later incorporated into a Bush campaign button, Bush said, "I'm a better man for it," when asked at a press conference what he leaned from his meeting with the Austin 12.

During his first year in office, gay Republicans said they encountered a welcoming environment at the White House. The atmosphere seemed to bloom after Bush appointed Evertz, a gay Republican activist from Wisconsin, as head of the White House AIDS Office.

Evertz made public appearances across the country, presenting himself as an emissary of good will from the Bush administration to gay rights and AIDS advocacy organizations.

The high point of what appeared to be a warm relationship between the administration and gays took place in May 2001, when Evertz spoke before about 150 members and guests at a Log Cabin Republicans dinner in Washington.

"I can absolutely, positively, categorically confirm that, in President Bush, we have a friend and we have a decent human being," Evertz told the gathering in discussing a meeting he had with the president at the White House one month earlier.

A little over a year later, the White House startled AIDS activists by announcing Evertz had been transferred out of the White House to a new job at the Department of Health & Human Services, where he would work on international AIDS issues. A short time later, the administration announced that O'Neill, who had worked on AIDS programs at HHS in the Clinton administration, would replace Evertz as head of the White House AIDS office.

Sources familiar with the White House had conflicting views on why Evertz was transferred, but most insiders believed the move was a disguised ouster that followed a White House power struggle among moderate and far-right political advisors.

Evertz, whose public appearances stopped when he started his job at HHS, declined to comment on the developments leading to his transfer. But reliable sources reported that Evertz viewed the transfer as a firing. O'Neill, meanwhile, made no public appearances before gay groups and never spoke publicly on gay-related issues as White House AIDS office director.

Charles Francis, a Bush family friend from Texas and a gay Republican supporter of Bush in the 2000 election, was credited with breaking new ground in advancing gay rights within the GOP when he founded the Republican Unity Coalition in 2001.

According to Francis, Evertz's departure at the White House was an early sign of what was to come in late 2003 and early 2004, when Bush and the White House drifted further away from the president's gay Republican supporters.

"There would be no more cooperation or support on any substantive policy matter," Francis said.

"There would be a Rose Garden ceremony supporting a federal marriage amendment," he said. "There would be no support ever for a Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill. There was a never-ending veto threat for employment discrimination protection.

"Squandered opportunity is the best way to describe the treatment of gay and lesbian Americans by the Bush Administration," Francis concluded.

Francis, a life-long Republican, later left the party in response to Bush's backing of the Federal Marriage Amendment and other anti-gay positions.

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