In an election so tight nearly every bloc of voters believes it might make up the margin of victory, perhaps nowhere is the rhetoric more heated than in the gay community.
Bill DuBay, gay activist and Democratic precinct captain in his downtown Seattle neighborhood, has a recurring nightmare that comes to him in broad daylight: He wakes up on Wednesday and George W. Bush is president-elect of the United States.
"Listen to George Bush," says DuBay, who has spent every night for weeks ringing doorbells and making his case for Vice President Al Gore. "He opposes everything for us. He came right out and said about gay marriage: 'I'm opposed to it.' A lot of us have kids, and where does he stand on artificial insemination for lesbians or gay adoption? There's that fear factor that we're going to start going backwards."
There's a lot of fear all right, argues Kevin Ivers, spokesman for the largest gay GOP group, the Log Cabin Republicans. But it's the creation of Democrats, he says, and like-minded gay activists--not Bush. "That's what the Democratic Party always resorts to in the last two weeks--a campaign based on panic and fear: 'Vote as if your life depends on it,' " Ivers says. "They literally want people to believe that if Al Gore doesn't win this election, their people will be put in death camps."
The talk in the gay community has been in life-and-death terms.
"We literally stand at the precipice of either splatting to Earth or soaring from a cliff when it comes to some basic civil rights," Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, said at a rally Tuesday at the University of Minnesota.
Birch and other gay activists have taken that message this week to Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico, hoping to talk liberals out of casting their vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader instead of Gore.
But as pro-Gore forces fan out across the country, gay Republicans have lashed back.
Log Cabin Republicans have called attention to a remark Gore made as a congressman in 1976, when he referred to homosexuality as "abnormal."
The group is also funding a nearly $300,000 ad campaign in gay print and radio markets that points out broken promises of the Clinton administration, such as allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
The kicker on one: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!"
