Obama Picks Kaine as DNC Leader

Barack Obama has chosen Tim Kaine to run the Democratic National Committee. This is a little bittersweet for the LGBT community in the respect that Kaine was the only candidate who responded to the Washington Blade’s 2005 request for Virginia Governor’s candidates to answer questions about gay issues (and was very positive about the LGBT community),but then when he became Governor of Virgina, he signed the Marshall-Newman Amendment, which defines marriage in Virginia as being between a man and a woman, even though he had previously opposed it.

So, Tim Kaine is polite and nice to gays, but perhaps lacks the guts to stand-up against anti-gay measures.

The Gay Mafia That’s Redefining Liberal Politics

From Time:

A few weeks before Virginia’s legislative elections in 2005, a researcher working on behalf of a clandestine group of wealthy, gay political donors telephoned a Virginia legislator named Adam Ebbin.

Then, as now, Ebbin was the only openly gay member of the state’s general assembly. The researcher wanted Ebbin’s advice on how the men he represented could spend their considerable funds to help defeat anti-gay Virginia politicians.Ebbin, a Democrat who is now 44, was happy to oblige. (Full disclosure: in the mid-’90s, Ebbin and I knew each other briefly as colleagues; he sold ads for Washington City Paper, a weekly where I was a reporter.) Using Ebbin’s expertise, the gay donors — none of whom live in Virginia — began contributing to certain candidates in the state. There were five benefactors: David Bohnett of Beverly Hills, Calif., who in 1999 sold the company he had co-founded, Geo-Cities, to Yahoo! in a deal worth $5 billion on the day it was announced; Timothy Gill of Denver, another tech multimillionaire; James Hormel of San Francisco, grandson of George, who founded the famous meat company; Jon Stryker of Kalamazoo, Mich., the billionaire grandson of the founder of medical-technology giant Stryker Corp.; and Henry van Ameringen, whose father Arnold Louis van Ameringen started a Manhattan-based import company that later became the mammoth International Flavors & Fragrances.

The five men spent $138,000 in Virginia that autumn, according to state records compiled by the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project. Of that, $48,000 went directly to the candidates Ebbin recommended. Ebbin got $45,000 for his PAC, the Virginia Progress Fund, so he could give to the candidates himself. Another $45,000 went to Equality Virginia, a gay-rights group that was putting money into many of the same races.

Read the rest by clicking here.