Roy Ashburn: Where do gay Republicans fit among conservatives?

Roy Ashburn, a Republican state senator in California, said Monday that he is gay. The disclosure raises new questions about gay Republicans’ place within the conservative movement.

(Page 2 of 2)

According to Moran, conservatives such as former Vice President Dick Cheney and Meghan McCain, who both support gay marriage, are changing many conservatives’ negative views about homosexuality.

Related stories

"[W]e are seeing a few more gay candidates running as Republicans each year," said Turner.

It's possible that Massachusetts could soon have the highest-ranking elected official who is gay. In the state's upcoming governor's race, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor – Massachusetts Senate minority leader Richard Tisei – is openly gay.

In the view of others, however, conservatives are a long way from accepting any openly gay ideological compatriots.

“While conservatives have embraced the equal rights and equal dignity of Jews, African-Americans, and women, they have not yet reached that point with gay people,” said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, at a recent forum in Washington on gay and conservative politics.

Now that Ashburn has said he is gay, this question has emerged: Will he change course on many gay-rights issues, which he previously voted against?

Ashburn represents the largely conservative Bakersfield, Calif., area, and he has a long record of voting against gay-rights measures. He told talk-show host Inga Barks on Monday that his votes were an effort to represent the views of his constituents.

“My votes reflect the wishes of the people in my district,” he said. “So as each of these individual measures came before the Legislature, I cast ‘no’ votes ... because the measures were almost always about acknowledging rights or assigning identification to homosexual persons.”

Ms. Barks asked whether he agreed with those votes on gay rights issues, but he didn’t answer the question. “I voted as I felt I should on behalf of the people who elected me,” he said.

[Editor's note: New material was added to this story to include comments from sources who responded to the Monitor after initial publication.]