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Photo: Steve Kohls/Brainerd
Dispatch
Used with permission. |
A Minnesota state senator who bucked his party in voting
against a measure that would have brought a gay marriage
amendment to the floor of the legislature has revealed
that he is gay, RAW STORY
has learned.
The senator, Republican Paul Koering, has also endorsed
efforts to expose gay politicians who wield their power
to oppose gay rights.
Koering, 40, hails from farm country, some 150 miles
north of Minneapolis. He says his decision to come out
was a complex one, but that the marriage amendment vote—aligned
with the two year anniversary of his mother’s
death—finally led him to believe the time was
right.
Koering also spoke at length with Mike Rogers, whose
blogACTIVE.com website
has reporting on the private gay lives of prominent
anti-gay politicians, who he says helped him in his
process of coming out. Rogers is also the editor of
an editorially independent franchise site of Raw Story
Media, RawStoryQ.
Since the vote, Koering says he’s been besieged
by calls and emails from people wanting to know his
orientation.
“It’s hampered me from doing the real work
that I want to do here,” Koering told RAW
STORY. “I just felt that I need to talk to
these reporters and say, ‘Yep I’m gay, so
what?’ and now that’s done let’s talk
about the real issues, good paying jobs with healthcare
benefits, talk about issues that affect families and
people in their daily lives.”
As a proud Republican legislator who stood alone against
his party to take a stand against what he sees as discrimination,
Koering’s support for reporting on “hypocritical”
gay politicians—including Republicans—is
certain to send a shockwave through the Washington gay
community.
"Somebody who is possibly in the closet and uses
their bully pulpit or their position to bash gay people
or to make gay people’s lives difficult... and
are in essence leading a double life — people
like that need to be exposed for the hypocrite that
they are," Koering says.
“And I sometimes find that, I feel that the people
that you find who are hollering the loudest and who
are putting people down the most are the ones that have
the most to hide,” he added. “They’re
so uncomfortable in their own skin that they have to
tear everybody else down to make themselves feel good.”
Other prominent gay rights groups disagree.
Mark Shields, a spokesman for the gay lobby Human Rights
Campaign, said they were glad to hear of the senator’s
decision. He added, however, that HRC continues to maintain
a policy that politicians who maintain gay private lives
should not forced out of the closet based on their public
positions on gay issues.
“We encourage anyone to come out and take that
step and we hope that people will do that on their own
time and in their own way,” Shields said. “It’s
a brave and bold step.”
In comments
to the Capitol Hill newspaper, The Hill last
month, HRC's new president Joe Solmonese declined to
say he disagreed with 'outings.'
"Different people have different philosophies
about this and approach it in different ways,"
Solmonese said."If you’re outing someone
on the Hill, are you doing it because you’re going
to change their mind about their vote?... I think that
I and the HRC focus on how people vote and what people
say."
Shields said Solmonese's position was "consistent"
with the group's views on opposing such reporting.
The Log Cabin Republicans, who also work for gay rights,
also oppose reporting on gay politicians who oppose
gay rights.
“Our position on this has been absolutely crystal
clear," said Log Cabin political director Chris
Barron. "We oppose outing, period. So far this
outing campaign has not changed one vote. Every moment
spent calling an office to find out whether or not someone
is gay is a call not spent encouraging a legislator
to support pro-gay legislation or encouraging a legislator
not to vote for anti-gay legislation."
Koering says that he called the Log Cabin group after
seeing their executive director on CSPAN. He says he
has spoken with their Washington office, but that ultimately
the executive director failed to return his calls.
“If I was the executive director of the Log Cabin
Republicans and you’re trying to promote gay Republicans
and some legislator calls and says 'I’m gay,'
I guess I would have kept calling every three minutes
order to talk to that person,” he said. "I
tried his number four or five times and then I just
gave up."
Barron disagreed with Koering's assessment, saying
the Log Cabin's director—a former state legislator
himself— had offered to fly out and visit him.
"When I spoke to the Senator earlier this year
I made it clear that we at Log Cabin appreciated his
voice and his courage as an elected gay official,"
Barron said in a statement. "After that conversation,
we traded emails and he made it clear in those emails,
and conversation, that he appreciated me taking the
time to talk to him. I also put him in touch with our
President, Patrick Guerriero. Patrick spoke to the Senator,
after a series of back and forth voicemails, and actually
offered to go meet with him in Minnesota this year."
"We wish him well, are willing to work with him
in building an inclusive GOP, and again thank him for
his courage," Barron added.
As a farmer for fifteen years, Koering worked hard
for his Senate seat, and the decision to announce that
he is gay could mean he’ll eventually be out of
a job. He campaigned for the same seat for seven years,
finally defeating a long-term incumbent in 2000.
“There were nights that I would finish milking
and I would go to bed and I would cramp up – I
would almost cry myself to sleep,” he said of
his long crusade for his seat.
After he lost an earlier election, he says, he “was
in every parade with my float, I went to every church
dinner, I went to every chamber function, I kissed every
baby three times.”
But the vote against the marriage amendment brought
relief, he stated.
“I actually feel relieved that I voted the way
I did, I feel like I made the right vote, and I wouldn’t
change it,” the senator told RAW
STORY. “And I feel like I did do the right
thing. And if in doing the right thing I get unelected,
I guess that’s fine with me. I can live with that.”
“The only thing I’m worried about are the
83,000 people that I represent," he continued.
"And I did talk to the chair of the Crowing Country
Republicans and he said that the executive committee
might consider asking for [my] resignation."
“I said, I don’t think that would be a
good idea on your part," he added.
Koering says he supports the Defense of Marriage Act
Minnesota has on its books, which prevents the state
from recognizing gay marriages. But he feels that a
constitutional amendment takes things too far. He says
legalizing gay marriage at this point would be moving
"too fast."
"Society just isn’t ready for that yet,"
he remarked. "You can only push things so far –
things only change so fast. I think they’ve changed
fast, and they’re changing even faster, and there’s
a rush of these people to have a constitutional amendment
because they know that society is changing and people’s
hearts are changing."
RAW
STORY's full interview and the background of his
conversations with Rogers before he came out will be
published Thursday.
Koering
lauds Rogers' work but believes that only gay politicians
who work against gay rights should be asked about their
sexuality.
"I think in Mike calling me what turned out to
be chunk of coal kind of turned into a diamond,"
he said. "Because I think it started out very awkward
and I was on the defense, but it really turned out to
be something good."
Article originally published Apr. 13, 2005. |
