Florida: Bring Aboard the Bigots

Florida: Bring Aboard the Bigots
As Found On BallotBlog

Guest blogger Professor Dan Smith is the pre-eminent authority on campaign financing and special interest activity in the ballot initiative process. He is currently the Scholar in Residence at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center Foundation.
It appears the Republican Party of Florida has decided to come out of the closet. It’s a big step for the party, as it appears that it has officially abandoned all pretenses of being an inclusive, big-tent party.
According to campaign finance reports filed with the Florida Division of Elections, the Republican Party of Florida has contributed $150,000 to Florida4Marriage, the group backing a flailing constitutional ballot initiative attempting to ban gay marriage. The lump sum from the party comprised more than half the $272,000 the anti-gay group raised in 2005.
The President of the Florida Family Policy Council, John Stemberger, who is behind the measure, claims that the donation from the party to his group was unsolicited.
But Stemberger’s group has close ties with the RPoF. Stemberger, an Orlando-based trial lawyer who boasts of his membership in the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, was Political Director of the state party in 1992. And the group has paid more than $5,000 in “consulting fees” to an obscure evangelical bookstore in Orlando, Encouragement Company, owned by author and Republican state party photographer LeAnn Weiss, who has ties to Carole Jean Jordan, the Chairman of the state party. Looks like these “consulting fees” turned out to be a pretty good investment.
Why the state party decided to place its $150,000 imprimatur on a crusade deemed unnecessary by Governor Jeb Bush is anyone’s guess. Bush, whose spokeswoman said he was unaware of the party’s contribution, has been lukewarm about the proposed amendment, saying it was not needed because same-sex marriage in the state is already prohibited by statute.
The state party’s contributions also appear to have broken new ground nationally. In 2004, many Republican state parties could be seen lurking in the shadows behind the anti-gay marriage measures on 13 statewide ballots, but they generally demurred from officially endorsing the measures. While it is well known that Karl Rove and other national and state GOP operatives were supportive of the anti-gay marriage ballot measures, no other state party—and not even the Republican National Committee or President Bush’s campaign—was emboldened enough to contribute directly to any of the campaigns.
It seemed as though the Florida Republicans had shelved their bigoted past, leaving behind the shameful antics of Anita Bryant and her gay-bashing crusade in the late 1970s. But apparently not, as the leaders of the Republican Party of Florida—most notably the party Executive Director Andy Palmer—see gay-bashing as a winning electoral strategy in 2006.
In addition to ginning up electoral support for a party losing political traction in the state, it’s possible that the state party is implicitly tipping its support to gubernatorial candidate Tom Gallagher, the state’s Chief Financial Officer, who is running principally on a platform of “family values.” While both Gallagher and his chief primary opponent, Attorney General Charlie Crist, both publicly support the anti-gay marriage measure, Stemberger happens to be of Gallagher’s chief backers and a member of his Family Policy Team.


For their part, leading Democratic candidates for governor, Jim Davis and Rod Smith, have both disavowed the discriminatory initiative, saying that the constitutional amendment would be unnecessary.
It remains to be seen whether the gay marriage measure qualifies for the 2006 ballot. If it does, there is no guarantee that it will drive voter turnout in the gubernatorial race, as many Florida Republicans are weary of their party falling into the hands of the religious right. The state party, however, seems to have already fallen.