🚀 go-pugleaf

Mike Mills wrote:
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 19:41:01 +1000
> From: Capital Q Weekly
> To: rwockner@netcom.com
> Subject: CQ's Story on Kemp
> 
> 15 August 1996
> 
> Rex,
> 
> For your information (to use or circulate if you want) here is the copy of
> the Jack Kemp story which is running tomorrow, Friday, in Melbourne and
> Sydney.
> 
> Peter O
> 
> Category: international
> Newsgroups: Kemp.Dole.745*Repub.Pres.
> Date Filed: 13 August 1996
> Time Filed: 2010
> Status: Copyright 1996 Peter O'Shea
> 
> Dole's mate Kemp: the stories abound
> 
> by Peter O'Shea
> 
> Jack Kemp, the man chosen by Republican Bob Dole to be his running mate in
> the November US presidential elections, has a gay past - at least that's
> the speculation resurrected by numerous news reports in the US this week.
> 
> While the nation's two largest gay lobby groups, the Human Rights Campaign
> (HRC) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), issued a joint
> statement condemning Kemp's anti-gay record in politics, others were
> speculating that Kemp's record in bed is anything but anti-gay.
> 
> Associated Press this week ran a story in which one of Kemp's former
> campaign managers was asked about a report dating back nearly 30 years
> that Kemp participated in a wild gay party at a ski cabin, which he partly
> owned with several gay men, in Lake Tahoe.
> 
> The story, which Charles Black who managed Kemp's campaign in 1988
> dismissed as "totally unfounded", dates back to 1967 when Kemp worked for
> then-California Governor, Ronald Reagan.
> 
> After the party the New York Times ran an article reporting that a
> "homosexual ring" was running Reagan's office. At least one of Reagan's
> aides was fired. Later, in the mid-1980s, Newsweek ran a report in which
> Kemp maintained his investment in the cabin was strictly a business
> arrangement.
> 
> Then in 1986 the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that an interview the
> week before on NBC's Today Show, in which Kemp was asked whether he had
> ever had a homosexual experience, had prompted his handlers to screen
> future interviews and "bar any that go into the old slanders against him".
> 
> Black told AP this week the Lake Tahoe story was "a piece of poison".
> "Every reporter or news organisation that ever looked into it concluded it
> was totally unfounded," he was quoted as saying.
> 
> But that does not seem to be the case. The San Francisco Independent and
> the New York gay newspaper LGNY also reported this week that Kemp, 53, who
> is married with four children, is rumored to be gay.
> 
> LGNY reporter Andy Humm explained that "when someone being hailed as
> supposedly tolerant and committed to civil rights is in reality someone
> who shuts the door in faces of gay people on every single issue, it
> becomes relevant if he is homosexual".
> 
> In addition, at least a dozen reports from US gay journalists and
> activists on Kemp's supposed gay past have been passed onto Capital Q.
> 
> Capital Q has, however, been unable to substantiate them.
> 
> The reports come amid a mood of overwhelming disappointment on the behalf
> of gay groups that Dole has picked a right-wing, populist, anti-gay,
> pro-life candidate who opposed sanctions on apartheid South Africa, as his
> choice of running mate.
> 
> The HRC and the NGLTF last Friday described the would-be US Vice-President
> as "not as acerbic as some of his colleagues" but nonetheless someone with
> a "solid anti-gay record".
> 
> In May this year, commenting on the US Supreme Court's decision
> overturning an anti-gay constitutional amendment in Colorado, Kemp told
> CNN one judge "was wrong in suggesting that the people of Colorado had an
> animosity toward gay people. What they were basically saying, they
> shouldn't get special rights".
> 
> In 1990 he also opposed a non-discrimination policy and limited family
> benefits for gay government employees, telling the union, according to a
> Washington Post report in March 1992, he would not approve the contract
> "because the clause has been widely viewed as extending domestic
> partnership benefits to gay and lesbian employees".
> 
> Kemp, who is a Distinguished Fellow of the arch-conservative, right wing
> policy think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, also favours firing gay
> teachers.
> 
> "I think a school board should have the right to choose what type of
> example we have for our children in public schools," he said in an
> interview with David Frost, according to a report in the Washington Post
> late last year.
> 
> "Since gay marriage is polling better than Bob Dole he had to do something
> dramatic," said HRC spokesperson, David M Smith.
> 
> "Though the move will be seen by many as a move to the political centre,
> Kemp's record indicates a continued trend to the hard right with the party
> firmly in the hands of religious political extremists dominated by the
> Christian Coalition and the ultra right wing Council for National Policy."
> 
> -end-

I really don't think the point is whether Kemp is gay or not!  The point 
is, if we as a gay community don't get off our asses and vote, then Dole 
and Kemp will have free reign to proceed with whatever right wing agendas 
they have.  It's up to us to get out and be heard.  It doesn't matter if 
you are gay or straight.  Today its gays, tomorrow it could be blacks or 
the poor!  We have obviously proven our numbers are more than the 
published 2%!  Bitchin about the problem won't make it go away.  Vote and 
make your opinions heard.