NEW YORK — With their crisp suits and clean-cut boy- and girl-next-door demeanor, the leaders of America's best-known gay Republican organization give little warning they're gearing up for a high-noon showdown at the OK Corral.
Encamped at the Republican National Convention, the Log Cabin Republicans are awash in patriotic decor. There is red, white and blue bunting. Red, white and blue flowers. Red, white and blue balloons kissing the ceiling, as Log Cabin delegates pose for photographs with an Abraham Lincoln impersonator.
Articulate, educated and well mannered, these very circumspect gay Republicans suggest that they are the ones who are safe as milk and American as apple pie.
The people off kilter, they suggest, are the social conservatives who back a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, which the Log Cabin Republicans say is "anti-family" and "targets part of the American family for discrimination."
Bring on the cameras: This posse is ready for C-SPAN.
"We have a war going on that is dividing this country," Patrick Guerriero, the group's executive director and the former mayor of Melrose, Mass., said as he prepared for a panel on the eve of the convention that was, in fact, covered by C-SPAN.
"We're asking President Bush and the Republican leaders to address where they stand," said Guerriero, 36, whose crisp navy-blue suit and tie seem borrowed from the playbook of the Heritage Foundation. "Are they with the exclusionist voices of [the Rev.] Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer? Or are they with the inclusive voices of the prime-time speakers?
"You really can't have it both ways."
Some say the Republican Party is trying to do just that. Many prime-time speakers at the Republican convention -- including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Gov. George Pataki, who were the official honorees at the Log Cabin's Sunday kickoff bash -- do not support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.
"The politics of inclusion are just as important now as they were in Lincoln's time," Bloomberg told the cheering Log Cabin delegates assembled Sunday at a trendy Manhattan bistro, later adding: "I don't think we should ever use the Constitution to drive wedges between us."
Guerriero was delighted with support from mainstream Republicans. But he believes that spotlighting moderates at the convention is a cynical ploy to "put lipstick on the pig" -- in other words, put a moderate face on [the] party."
