Bush Campaign Manager, Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman, Comes Out

Posted by | August 25, 2010 19:05 | Filed under: Top Stories


Ken Mehlman, the former George W. Bush campaign manager and Chair of the Republican National Committee, has publicly announced he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”

Mehlman supported, in fact headed as RNC Chair, a party that he knew was pushing an anti-gay agenda.

Mehlman’s leadership positions in the GOP came at a time when the party was stepping up its anti-gay activities — such as the distribution in West Virginia in 2006 of literature linking homosexuality to atheism, or the less-than-subtle, coded language in the party’s platform (“Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country…”). Mehlman said at the time that he could not, as an individual Republican, go against the party consensus. He was aware that Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief strategic adviser, had been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.

Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.

Some gay rights activists are saying it’s an act of courage for Mehlman to come out, being the highest ranking Republican official to do so. Others, like Mike Rogers, think he should have done so long ago, rather than preside over a party that was using homosexuality as a wedge issue.

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Copyright 2010 Liberaland
By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.

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