By Karen Ocamb

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee, sounded relaxed, as if he was happy to talk to IN Los Angeles magazine about a new rule he hopes will expand LGBT participation in the Democratic Party. The new “Inclusion Rule” requires state parties to work toward the goal of achieving full participation by the LGBT community in the DNC delegate selection process and could have the ripple effect of enhancing the clout of LGBT Democrats throughout the country. But these are Democrats, for whom consensus building is often a contact sport and neither Dean nor the Inclusion Rule arrived at this point unscathed.

For the past year and a half, Dean has been under searing attacks by some gay Democrats for what appeared to be a series of missteps. Once beloved by the LGBT community for signing the nation’s first civil unions bill as governor of Vermont, Dean stumbled when implementing his long-range “50-state strategy,” which resulted in the elimination of the LGBT outreach desk in favor of integrating all constituency groups into the DNC system.

On April 15, 2005, at the California Democratic Convention, Assemblymember Mark Leno, author of the state’s marriage equality bill, expressed disappointment with Dean for issuing statements saying Democrats do not support same-sex marriage, which he described as a “different issue here in California.” Indeed, the State Legislature eventually passed Leno’s marriage equality bill, which was vetoed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Dean also upset some gays after he fired Donald Hitchcock, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Leadership Council, this past April shortly after Hitchcock’s partner, political consultant Paul Yandura, wrote an open letter criticizing Dean for not fighting harder to protect gay couples. The skirmish seemed to become a cause celebre for the gay Washington Blade. Dean subsequently hired Brian Bond, the respected former director of the Victory Fund, to be the inside-DNC liaison.

But gays of all political stripes were outraged when Dean appeared on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club in an attempt to reach out to evangelical voters. During the May 10 interview, Dean said the 2004 DNC Party Platform “says marriage is between a man and a woman.” The platform actually says that marriage should be left up to the states and that the DNC supports “full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation...” The DNC quickly issued a clarification, quoting Dean as saying he “misstated” the platform and pledging the party’s commitment to “equal protection under the law.” But many national LGBT groups didn’t accept the explanation and criticized Dean’s “lack of leadership” on LGBT issues. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force even returned a $5,000 DNC donation.

Since then, however, Dean has publicly advocated for gays. On May 19, he blasted the Senate Judiciary Committee for passing “a divisive and hate-filled constitutional amendment” banning same-sex marriage. On June 6, he slammed President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for pushing the amendment “instead of spending the Senate’s time on the priorities of the American people.” The measure, he said, “is morally wrong. It hurts LGBT Americans, and it hurts our country.”

Last year, openly gay L.A.-based DNC member John Perez suggested expanding outreach to the LGBT community by including gays under the Affirmative Action plan for Delegate Selection (Rule 6). Garry Shay, a longtime L.A.-based DNC member and rules wizard, immediately started working on the project and presented it at the Aug. 19 DNC meeting in Chicago. Shay’s Inclusion Rule (7), adopted for the Delegate Selection process for the 2008 Convention, is a “separate but different” plan for LGBT participation.

“The Democratic Party has made a tremendous advance in eliminating under-representation of the LGBT and disabled communities by requiring state parties to adopt Inclusion Plans designed to achieve full participation of these groups at the state and national level, equivalent to their presence in the Democratic electorate,” Shay told IN. “The new rules also recognize and respect the distinct historic difference between state sanctioned voter deprivation of the African-American, Hispanic, Native American, Asian/Pacific American communities on the one hand, and the societal and institutional causes of under-representation of the LGBT and disabled communities in the political process on the other. While the results are the same, the causes of the under-representation were in fact different and justify different approaches to increasing participation. In the case of the historic state-sanctioned deprivation of voter rights, a remedial approach to affirmative action has traditionally been utilized, while an inclusionary approach to increasing diversity is justified in the case of the LGBT and disabled communities.”

“The LGBT Caucus thought they needed language that made it clear that we were going to be inclusive and increase the number of LGBT delegates so that we would have equal representation. That’s what the goal was and that’s what we did,” Dean told IN in an exclusive 25-minute phone interview from DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C. “The LGBT community is a minority community—no question about that. The technical difference that arose was that Rule 6 actually had to do with the Voting Rights Act and LGBT folks had never been prevented from voting. So it’s a different rule, but clearly LGBT folks are a distinct minority. “

The Inclusion Rule also says participation should be gauged “as indicated by their presence in the Democratic electorate.” Dean was asked how that would be measured. “That was actually a question I raised in the original LGBT Caucus. When they first presented this issue, I said, ‘Well, does that mean you’re going to include people who aren’t out? Do you want to put pressure on people to get out in order in order to get into this?’ So that was a big, hotly debated issue within the Caucus itself,” Dean said. “What we’ve asked Stonewall Democrats to do is to come up with a program to help the state parties figure out what this means in each state. Every minority is different and this particular minority is interesting because, while people know for themselves—for the most part, but not entirely—if they’re in this minority or not, the world does not necessarily know if they’re in this minority. [For example,] the vast majority of African Americans are African American because they’re African Americans and that’s what they look like. [However,] if you’re LGBT, you’re really only a full-fledged member of the minority when you say you are. So the question becomes, unless you’re fully out in everything you do, are you a member of the minority? That’s a tough issue and that’s why we thought Stonewall would be a good group of people to figure this one out.”

Told about efforts by IN and others to have gay people considered a minority and not an “issue,” as pollsters apparently perceive the LGBT community, Dean said he favors including LGBT as a demographic.

“We don’t generally talk about our polling publicly because obviously it’s proprietary stuff we use against the Republicans,” Dean said. “But to say that the LGBT community is not a demographic and is not a distinct minority is to ignore the enormous purchasing power in the community. I think that’s just foolish. Without talking about our polling, which we don’t do as a matter of policy, let me just say we are very interested in exit poll data which would show us how gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual voters vote. That’s of great interest to us. We don’t comment on our polling but we are extremely interested in that so therefore we try to get that information. “

IN noted that the L.A. Times exit poll in the June 2001 election for mayor indicated that Antonio Villaraigosa won 73 percent of the gay vote. When Villaraigosa subsequently won election last year, he cited that statistic as one of the reasons he approached the LGBT community early when he decided to run again.

“That [percentage] is actually a number that is very consistent with what we know happens nationally for Democrats,” Dean said. “It’s actually a little better nationally for Democrats. I think that’s because of the assault on the LGBT population from the Republicans. In general, LGBT voters are probably our second or third most loyal group of voters—the first being African Americans, of course, and then LGBT and then Jewish voters—tied second/third. It’s hard to say what the order is. But it is harder to poll in the LGBT community—people don’t want to necessarily self-identify to an anonymous pollster who calls them up. It’s not so easy to do this polling. But of course we don’t comment on what we in fact actually do as Democrats. But we do happen to have very good data.”

Though gays have proven loyal to the Democrats, the feeling has not always been mutual, IN noted, pointing out that many in the LGBT community felt sucker-punched when former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) seemed to blame the LGBT community for losing the 2004 election because anti-gay ballot measures brought religious conservatives to the polls.

“We don’t, first of all, believe that we lost because of gay issues,” Dean said. “We think we weren’t sufficiently vigorous in supporting our turnout efforts in rural communities and we weren’t sufficiently vigorous in defending a Democratic point of view. Unlike some other folks in the party, my view is if you want to win, you’ve got to behave like Democrats, and not Republican-light. It’s a fundamental difference in how we approach elections since I’ve been chairman. We believe we can’t win if people can’t tell the difference between parties. Second, we’ve been pretty open and pretty vocal. You know I took some flack for going on the 700 Club and Christian Broadcasting Network News, but the sensational part was mischaracterizing the platform. What nobody wrote about was that I went on a very conservative Christian Broadcasting Network News and said that gay and lesbian Americans need to be included in this society, that we believe in equal rights under the law for every single American—on Christian Broadcasting Network News. So we’re not going to apologize for our friends and our supporters.”

Dean would not comment on the controversy over the Hitchcock firing, as reported by the Washington Blade. “First of all, we consider the Washington Blade to be the New York Post of the gay and lesbian press corps. They’re not credible and they have somebody who has an agenda which is certainly not favorable to the Democratic Party so we simply don’t give them any credence,” Dean said. “Secondly, I’m not going to comment on anybody’s firing except to say that it had nothing to do with retribution or anything like that. It was simply a job performance matter. Thirdly, we have for the first time in DNC history put money into Illinois to make sure that the marriage amendment didn’t go forward and we won that one.”

Does the DNC support full marriage equality? “What we support is equal rights under the law for every single American,” Dean said. “We don’t take a position on the ‘M’ word. Even in the gay community, there are differences on this one. We believe everybody in America deserves the same rights under the law. We believe there are many brave Americans who happen to be lesbian or gay who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and they deserve the same rights as everybody else—period. Now, how we get to those rights we can have a debate about. But there is a really big difference between the Democrats and Republicans because the Republicans fundamentally not only believe that the LGBT doesn’t deserve their rights, but they see nothing wrong with using the LGBT community as a scapegoat in order to win elections. That we will not do.”