Asked if he was familiar with the anti-gay marriage flyers mailed by
the Republican National Committee in Arkansas and West Virginia which
suggested that elected liberals would ban bibles and allow gay
marriage, Banning said he "wasn’t aware of that."
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=305
9/24/2004
Chief Financial Officer of Republican National Committee admits he’s
gay, stays quiet
By John Byrne
Jay Banning, the Chief Financial Officer and Director of
Administration for the Republican National Committee since Ronald
Reagan’s presidency in 1983 acknowledged that he was gay during a
telephone conversation Saturday.
Banning was first suggested to be gay by activist Mike Rogers, whose
outing campaign has already targeted two gay congressmen who have
voted against measures allowing gay couples to marry and adopt
children.
Banning, as CFO and Director of Administration for the GOP, is
responsible for all accounting systems, the administration of party
headquarters, GOP security, personnel, information services, graphic
services and executive secretariat services.
Asked if he was out at work, Banning said, "uh, we don’t discuss it."
He added that he didn’t feel that he was at risk of being fired for
being gay.
"I don’t believe so," he said.
The 2004 Republican Party platform, approved in August, is titled "A
Safer World and A More Hopeful America."
It begins, "Ronald Reagan believed that people were basically good,
and had the right to be free. He believed that bigotry and prejudice
were the worst thing a person could be guilty of."
The platform includes a bolded section titled, "Ensuring Equal
Opportunities."
The section leads with the sentence, "Our nation is a land of
opportunity for all, and our communities must represent the idea of
equality for every citizen."
Apparently, this doesn’t include gay Americans.
"We believe that neither federal nor state judges nor bureaucrats
should force states to recognize other living arrangements as
equivalent to marriage."
"After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence , and
millenia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are
presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization,
the union of a man and a woman in marriage."
Banning, who has collected more than $270 million for the Republican
Party in the 2004 election cycle for the most explicitly anti-gay
platform the party has held in history, said he has no problem with
spending tens of millions of dollars to restrict the rights of a group
he’s part of.
"I don’t seem to have a problem with it," he said. "I’m not in the
policy area."
Queried further, he remarked, "I don’t make the policy."
Asked if he was familiar with the anti-gay marriage flyers mailed by
the Republican National Committee in Arkansas and West Virginia which
suggested that elected liberals would ban bibles and allow gay
marriage, Banning said he "wasn’t aware of that."
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| Hezbollah endorses George W. Bush: http://www.hezbollah.ws/
| "Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and
| those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it."
| -- UN Secretary General Kofi Annan talking about Bush's war crimes.
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