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April 11, 2012

When Is a Flip Not a Flop?By BILL KELLER

At the end of January, New Yorks Conservative Party, the most influential of the minor

parties that complicate the states politics, celebrated its 50th anniversary at a Holiday Inn

near the Albany airport, a vast and dingy venue that reminded me of athlete housing left

over from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Politicians like former Gov. George Pataki, who owed

his election to the Conservatives, came to pay homage to the party for its record of steering

the states politics to the right.

But one calamity darkened the mood of nostalgia and self-congratulation:the passage last

summer of a law legalizingsame-sex marriage. For many New Yorkers, the June 24

marriage vote was a rare moment of goosebump drama from a capital better known for

tedious dysfunction. For the Conservatives, and in particular for Mike Long, the ex-marine

who has been the partys chairman for nearly half of its history, the vote was a triple

humiliation.

It was, first, a defining triumph for the states ambitious new Democratic governor, Andrew

Cuomo. Second, it was an abandonment by Republican leaders, who had invoked party

discipline to kill similar legislation in 2009. This time the Republican leaders publicly

opposed gay marriage, but knowing that both public opinion and lobbying muscle were

coalescing on the other side, they freed their members to vote as they wished. And that led

to what was, for Mike Long, an unforgivable betrayal. All four of the Republican senators

who voted for the bill and provided the necessary margin for it to pass had been elected with

the Conservative endorsement, a prize for which opposition to gay marriage was an essential

litmus test. Two of those wayward senators would not have won their seats without the

Conservative boost.

Try as they might to explain away the defections perhaps it was the lure of money from

gay hedge-fund billionaires, or some devilish deal with Cuomo the Conservatives feared

that this defeat, if not punished, could mean an ominous loss of influence.

The Fate of the Republicans Who Supported Gay Marriage - N... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/magazine/republicans-w

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The four Republican apostates now had targets on their backs.

It is difficultto construct an argument against marriage rights for gay people that doesnt

sound like an argument against gay people. Mike Long and his fellow partisans, like many

conservatives nationwide, build their case on what they call the defense of traditional

marriage. No society in history, they told me repeatedly, has extended marriage rights tohomosexuals, and so we shouldnt risk the unraveling of civilization by starting now.

(Apparently they dont count the 10 countries, from Canada to South Africa, where gays may

legally marry and civilization endures.) Ive had a few conversations with Long, trying to

understand what harm they think they are defending marriage from. In one conversation I

recounted my own classic wedding at the Holy Name of Jesus church, and wondered how

somebody elses less conventional marriage could diminish the joy of it.

Well, I dont think it hurts anybody, Long replied, but I think a society has to have certain

standards, and since the beginning of time, marriage has been between a man and awoman. Marriage, he elaborated, is about children. Youre not going to procreate children

with same-sex couples.

I told him that would be news to my daughters school classmates, the ones with two moms

or two dads. And by the way, we dont prohibit elderly, infertile or just plain procreation-

averse couples from marrying.

I know plenty of gay couples, O.K.? he snapped back. Some of them, if not all of them, are

very good people, O.K.? I just dont believe that society needs to change what the definitionof marriage is to accommodate their lifestyle. Thats all. You know, that may be old-school.

But I think Western civilization has done pretty good old-school.

The quartet of dissident Republicans are themselves fairly old-school, at least when it comes

to the rest of their conservative credentials. They come not from liberal Manhattan or the

upscale suburbs of Westchester County. They are upstate guys, from struggling former mill

towns and diminished Rust Belt cities. So while the senators political calculus differs from

district to district, their experiences give us a glimpse into how this issue is likely to play out

in real America, as conservatives are fond of calling it, and not just in the coastalmetropolises. Which is why the fates of these four are being watched intently by national

lobbies and wavering politicians across the country.

The least vulnerable of the four is probably Stephen M. Saland, a patrician-looking lawyer

whose Poughkeepsie district sits about a two-hour drive north of New York City. A Capitol


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fixture since 1980 and a conscientious legislative technician, Saland negotiated with Cuomo

the details of a shrewd compromise that assured religious organizations that they would not

be compelled to participate in gay marriages, giving a bit of shelter to lawmakers worried

about religious blowback. Saland agonized over this issue with his gay-marriage-supporting

wife, but one acquaintance said his decision seemed to grow out of his immersion in the

legislative language. He refused to talk for this article because of an old grudge against TheTimes over what an aide described as an out-of-context quote.

Roy J. McDonald, who represents former mill towns like Troy and Mechanicville, didnt see

much percentage in reminiscing about his vote, either. He literally backpedaled as I

interviewed him in the Senate lobby. I did what I thought was right, he told me. The voters

understand that, but now they want to talk about jobs and foreclosures, not marriage. I

cant dwell on this stuff. McDonald is a Vietnam veteran and former steelworker. Though

he is now a banker, he retains a bluff manner, but with a compassionate streak when it

comes to those born different. Friends say he has two autistic grandsons, and watching the

insensitivity the boys endured gave him a kind of collateral distaste for those who would

marginalize gays. McDonald, entirely in character, responded to criticism by announcing

that if doing the right thing costs him his seat, They can take the job and shove it. That did

not sit well with some local Republican leaders, but its the kind of directness his

constituents seem to like.

Jim Alesi, who formerly had a business operating laundry rooms in apartment buildings and

dormitories, has been in politics for 23 years. He represents a swath of the Rochester area

thats more white-collar than blue-. When the Senate rejected gay marriage in 2009, Alesi

toed his partys line, but he held his head in visible distress, in part because it felt like a

betrayal of his friend Thomas Duane, the Senates only openly gay member. I promised

myself then that I would never vote no on this issue again, he told me. And because his

relatively affluent electorate leans moderate on social issues, the vote was not likely to fire

up a huge reaction. Unfortunately for Alesi, he has other liabilities more on those later

and he knows that some in his own party, not just the Conservatives, would like to throw

him overboard.

Mark Grisanti should be the most endangered Republican in the Senate. He is a freshman,

an Italian Catholic Republican in a slice of the Buffalo region that is five-to-one Democratic

and nearly 40 percent black. He won his seat by a mere 519 votes over an incumbent

African-American Democrat, Antoine Thompson. Thompson supported gay marriage, not a

popular view in the black churches of Buffalo.


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Grisanti didnt make a big deal of marriage in his campaign, but he told people he was in the

man-and-a-woman camp, which probably bought him a smattering of black support.

Moreover, Grisanti was listed on the ballot as the candidate of the Conservative Party in

addition to being the Republican nominee, and he reaped 4,368 votes on the Conservative

line.

So it is not a stretch to suggest that, between Conservative and black votes, Mark Grisanti

owes his seat to the fact that he identified himself as a no vote on gay marriage. It is also

not a stretch, as you will see, to say that if he wins re-election, it will be because he changed

his mind.

The choice ofa gay rights tour guide in Buffalo was obvious. Kitty Lambert and her

partner were the states first gay newlyweds. When the law went into effect, she and Cheryle

Rudd both longtime gay rights activists and, as Lambert likes to say, two fat

grandmothers drove from their home in Buffalo up to Niagara Falls for a midnightceremony. Lambert grew up Mormon, endured a series of husbands in the effort to live up

to her religions expectations and came out as a lesbian in her 30s. Between them, she and

Rudd have five grown children and 15 grandchildren.

Kitty Lambert, who now goes by Lambert-Rudd, got to know Grisanti pretty well during

months of lobbying him on the marriage bill, as he struggled with the tension between his

Catholic faith and his lawyers reverence for equality. The lawyer won. (I swore with my

hand on the Bible to uphold the Constitution, he told me. I didnt swear with my hand on

the Constitution to uphold the Bible.) Lambert-Rudd became so protective of the senatorthat she began a campaign to register like-minded Buffalo residents as members of the

Conservative Party, hoping they could fend off Mike Longs reprisals. She signed up about

300. This, someone joked, was like getting rabbis to enroll in Hamas to make it less hostile

to Israel.

I wondered how she felt about laboring to save the political skin of a conservative

Republican who disagreed with her on abortion rights and a slew of other issues.

Marks politics, she said. Wow. But I made a commitment to support anyone whorecognized my rights as a gay person. Because that is my calling right now, it tends to be my

full focus.

Not surprisingly, gay marriage is more likely to be a decisive issue for gays than for

opponents. But if you parse public opinion, you find the acceptance of gay marriage is not


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just growing; it is accelerating. This is driven, of course, by the overwhelming support of

young voters, but also by white Catholics, who have grown more open-minded on gay rights

as they have become more affluent and educated, and as their children return from college

with more liberal attitudes.

Adding to the inexorability is a factor pollsters refer to as salience, a measure of how muchan issue means to you. It figures heavily in what politicians decide is safe to do. Most

Americans favor restrictions on guns, for example, but gun control is stymied by salience:

the people who want full gun rights care far more about the issue than those who oppose

them. Opponents of gay marriage used to hold their opinion more passionately than

supporters. But as more Americans have openly gay children, siblings, friends and

neighbors, the supporters feel just as strongly. Another sign of seismic change: civil unions,

once regarded by gay-marriage supporters as a best-we-can-hope-for compromise, have

become a fallback position of the anti-marriage camp.

African-American support for gay marriage has remained stubborn, hovering around 30

percent for years, for reasons of class and education and because of the centrality of church

in their lives. According to internal memos of the National Organization for Marriage, the

anti-gay-marriage lobby sees an opportunity to play on the fact that some blacks resent

hearing gay marriage likened to their own civil rights struggle.

Fortunately for Grisanti, black congregations will not have much of a chance to register their

disapproval in November. The legislators who have designed a statewide redistricting plan

took extraordinary pains to protect Grisanti by sculpturing him a friendlier district. Theredrawn district cuts Grisantis black constituency to 5 percent from 37 percent and reduces

the Democrat-to-Republican ratio to less than two to one. To accomplish this, the designers

took two distant swatches of friendly territory and attached them by a long thin strand of

Lake Erie shoreline where the only constituents are fish.

Indeed, Grisanti and the other three are in the improbable position of having grateful

support both from the state G.O.P.leaders and from the Democratic governor. Cuomo,

whose popularity is high, has lavished praise on the Republican Four for their courage. And

Republican leaders are delighted that gay donors who might, in the wake of a defeat, have

mounted jihad against the states Republicans are instead contributing generously to save

these four Republican seats. Each raised between $400,000 and $540,000 in the 10 months

after the vote, mighty war chests for State Senate races. Discreetly, because local party

officials resent being leaned on, state Republican leaders have tried to wave off strong

challengers from filing in the Republican primaries of the four defectors.


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Daisies Cafe sitson a block of Lackawanna between the baroque immensity of Our Lady

of Victory basilica and the storefront office of the Erie County Conservative Party. It is home

to something called the Lard-ass Omelet (which contains every single meat we serve, a

waitress explained) and to a Saturday political breakfast that has been going on for 13 years.

It draws Buffalo pols from all parties but is long on Conservatives.

The Saturday I arrived, the county Conservative Party had just voted to deny Grisanti the

partys ballot line this year in favor of a conservative (and anti-gay-marriage) Democrat. A

month earlier the Erie County Conservative chairman, Ralph Lorigo, laid out for me a pretty

convincing case for forgiving Grisanti. The senator is pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro-business

on taxes and regulation, a champion of charter schools a budding star by most

Conservative measures. And importantly, Grisantis victory gave the Republicans their

single-member margin of control in the Senate, making it a far more congenial environment

for issues that matter to Conservatives. Why put that at risk for a little payback on gay

marriage?

Around the long table at Daisies, that sort of pragmatism could no longer be found. The

gay-marriage issue had now been rebranded as an integrity issue. It wasnt so much that

Grisanti had voted for marriage, the breakfasting pols said. Its that when he changed his

mind he should have announced that to voters and then submitted himself to another

election before casting such an important vote.

The rebranding suggested to me that the anti-marriage camp is aware of its salience

problem. Lashing Grisanti for a vote of conscience could be counterproductive, so the huntis under way for nonmarriage reasons to dump him. One that may get some mileage is the

senators recent involvement in a bar brawl at an Indian-owned casino in his district.

According to Grisantis account, he went to watch his daughter fill in for the lead singer of a

Rat Pack-era cover band called the Scintas. While waiting in the bar, he tried to verbally

defuse an argument between two drinkers; before he knew it fists were flying, someone had

knocked his wife to the floor and he was wading in to save her. The district attorney has

chosen to close the case, but Grisantis opponents wont.

What it comes down to is that the Conservatives need to prove they can still flex their

political muscles. I got a candid lesson in realpolitik from Jason J. McGuire, the acting

Livingston County chairman: You think were going to talk marriage, marriage, marriage

all of the time? No. In any campaign you find the weakness, and you exploit that. These

people betrayed their base.


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Like New Yorks Conservatives, the national lobbies for and against marriage equality see

the fate of these four New York Republicans as bearing heavily on their future influence in

states where marriage is still undecided. If marriage supporters cant protect their friends, if

opponents cant mete out punishment to the defectors, who will pay attention to them next

time?

The price is going to be paid by turncoats like Grisanti and the rest, declared Brian Brown,

president of the National Organization for Marriage, who claims to have $2 million

earmarked for the defeat of the New York Four.

So far, the most significant N.O.M. reprisals in New York have been billboards briefly

erected in the four districts, with a menacing but oddly nonspecific message addressed to

each senator: Youre Next. When I asked Conservative politicians in New York what part

the national lobby would play, most tended to agree with Thomas D. Cook, chairman of the

Monroe County party organization: I think theyre full of smoke.

The Sunday morningafter my breakfast at Daisies, I drove an hour past rolling dairy

pastures to Rochester to attend church with Senator Alesi, the only one of the four who state

Republican leaders believe is in real peril. A few days earlier, the Conservative Party

announced that Alesi ranked lowest of all Senate Republicans (52 percent) on its key-vote

scorecard; the Monroe County chairman declared that Alesi would not get the Conservative

line this year. The county Republican chairman was meeting with local party leaders to

discuss backing someone else.

Alesi is enjoying the financial largess that has accrued to other gay-marriage supporters, but

he has not been helped by redistricting. And where Grisanti is seen by party leaders as an

up-and-comer, Alesi is considered unpredictable as one prominent Republican put it, a

character.

When I met with the senator, his mood verged on fatalism. The club his enemies would use

to pummel him, he surmised, would not be gay marriage but a loopy episode known in his

district as the lawsuit. Back in 2008, Alesi was exploring houses for sale in a new

development called Trolley Brook Estates. Finding one house locked, he went in thebasement door. The house was still under construction, so he climbed up a ladder being

used as a makeshift stairway, fell and injured his leg. It turned out this house had already

been sold, but the owners agreed not to press trespassing charges. Then last year, a day

before the statute of limitations was set to expire, Alesi sued the homeowners, a retired

couple, for his injuries. A few days later, realizing that this was a boneheaded bit of public


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relations, he dropped the suit and apologized. I dont think I encountered a voter in

Rochester who hadnt followed the story.

Anyone who was surprised by Alesis vote for gay marriage has never been to services at

Spiritus Christi Church, where Alesi has been a parishioner for a half-dozen years. The 9:30

Mass was offered at a former Presbyterian sanctuary, and the 850 seats were filled with acheerful mix of multigenerational families and gay couples. The Mass featured a choir that

could hold its own in a gospel sing-off (the associate pastor calls it our mostly white black

choir) and a homily that turned Noahs tale into a parable of inclusiveness and second

chances. Alesi seemed to take real joy and comfort from the service, at one point leaning

over to tell me: This is a safe place. It feels so different from the world I work in.

Spiritus Christi bills itself as a Catholic church, not a Roman Catholic church. It was

expelled by the Vatican for, among other deviations, favoring the ordination of women and

an inclusive view of gay people. The clergy members began performing gay marriages longbefore the Legislature gave them legal status. Alesi has become something of a hero to the

congregation.

When he voted against it the first time, Jim Callan, the associate pastor, told me, they

grouped against him at the church. Last year when he voted in favor, the Rev. Mary

Ramerman announced it during Mass, and he got a standing ovation.

After Mass I drove around Alesis district and was struck by two things: first, most people I

spoke to knew the name of their state senator, which trust me is nowhere close tonormal. And second, the prevailing popular view was admiration and shared pride that a

politician had not followed the path of least resistance. I found people who disagreed with

his vote, and a few who said they might hold it against him in November. But there was

none of the vehemence I heard around the pols table at Daisies.

Many gays still experience America as intolerant, even menacing. But if the experience of

New Yorks Republican dissenters teaches us anything, it is how quickly the political tide is

turning, how quickly the untraditional is becoming normal. Is it moving quickly enough

that the Supreme Court, where the issue may be headed via a California test case, will decidethe country is ready to accept gay marriage as a constitutional right? Quickly enough that

the issue could be an asset, or at least not a liability, if Cuomo runs for president in 2016?

Neither would surprise me. At the very least, voting for gay marriage, even if you are a

Republican politician from the heartland, is not the risk it would have been just a couple of

years ago. The four defectors arent guaranteed re-election. But if they lose, it is likely to be


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in spite of their marriage vote, not because of it.

The earth didnt stop spinning, Alesi said. The moon didnt fall into the pond. The people

who live across the street are still the same people, except that theyre married.

Alesi is not the type to echo McDonalds chorus of Take the job and shove it, but he clings

to something that lawmakers rarely get from working in Albany, a sense of having done

something worthwhile and a little brave.

At the end of the day, wherever I end up, well have marriage equality in New York State,

he told me. There isnt anything you can point to in a political career, if youre just looking

over the years you served, that you can say was as big as this.

Bill Kelleris a former executive editor of The Times. He writes a column for the Op-Ed page.

EDITOR: Greg Veis


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