Americablog has gotten a hold of this document which appears to be a gay rights-related questionnaire that Harriet Miers answered when she ran for Dallas City Council in 1989. (ACSblog wonders whether the document is legit; John at Americablog says he got it from Human Rights Campaign and that they got it from a source they trust; and AP is now running the story.)
The questionnaire was written by LG-PAC, the political action committee of the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas. In the questionnaire, Miers answered "Yes" to this question: "Do you believe that gay men and lesbians should have the same civil rights as non-gay men and women?" And she expressed at least some support for AIDS education funding – probably not a terribly popular stance in 1989 in Texas. However, she said that she did not favor overturning Texas’s sodomy statute. And she said that she wasn’t seeking the group’s endorsement – though, oddly, she did show up at the group’s candidate screening session, at which she apparently said that she opposed discrimination based on sexual orientation. There’s some more reaction from the gay community here. And, interestingly, the freeper reaction isn’t as uniformly negative to this news as you might expect.
What to make of this? Hard to say. As John notes, we have to remember that this was 1989 in Texas, where public stances in favor of any sort of gay rights may have been quite unpopular, especially among Republicans. So there’s some faint comfort there. No, she doesn’t come across as a crusader for gay rights. But, like John Roberts before her, she also does not appear to have been reflexively opposed to all legal recognition of gay rights – after all, she could have simply declined to answer the questionnaire at all, or she could also have answered it quite differently. It’s at least something to think about, and certainly something worth exploring in detail in her Senate questionnaire and in the hearings.
So, it seems she might favor gay civil rights.Does this mean we won’t hear about Enron any more?
Au contraire, I wonder whether the Enron thing could derail this nomination before it ever gets going, as the facts about it become better known.