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Banned
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IMO, some of the responses here are illogical and reflexive. This is an example of long historyof persecution and harrassment driven by hypocrisy or dysfunction.
Quote:
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/jimwe..._west_politics
............................In a wide-ranging interview Wednesday night, West acknowledged he’d recently begun to seek out young men on the Internet and said he couldn’t explain why. “I don’t want to go into the whole issue, but I wouldn’t characterize me as ‘gay,’.” West said.
While acting pragmatically with moderates and conservatives as a Republican Party leader, West aligned himself with party conservatives on a range of hot-button social issues since 1983, when he first went to Olympia as a newly elected House member.
In 1986, he supported a bill allowing criminal background checks for jobs involving children. The measure was necessary because child abusers “often try to gain a position of trust and authority,” West said in a Spokesman-Review interview at the time.
West and 14 other Republicans reacted strongly to Gov. Booth Gardner’s Christmas Eve 1985 executive order banning discrimination in state hiring based on sexual orientation.
Their 1986 bill, which failed, would have barred gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day-care centers and some state agencies. It called for screening prospective employees for sexual orientation and firing employees whose homosexuality became known.
The bill prompted a Spokesman-Review op-ed column by Jeannette Loehr, spokeswoman for the Spokane Gay Leadership Coalition.
West’s bill is “police-state” legislation that stirs up “the fears of the ignorant and the hatred of the bigoted,” Loehr wrote.
In 1986, West voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS during sex. He said such instruction “is something people go buy at dirty bookstores.”
West became chairman of the Senate Health and Long Term Care Committee in 1990, a key post for legislation involving medicine and public health issues. That year, the Washington State Medical Association named him legislator of the year.
During a 1990 hearing on AIDS education, West proposed that teen sex be criminalized.
The bill, written by the abstinence group Teen Aid, would have made sexual contact – not just sexual intercourse – a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers 18 or younger. It defined sexual contact as “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person.”
The bill was ridiculed and got West a lot of negative press, including a National Lampoon Magazine spoof. “Get a Life, Sen. West!” a Seattle newspaper editorialized. But West said he was serious and would push it as far as he could.
“You know, there are a lot of kids out there that want a reason to say no,” he said. The bill died in the Senate on Feb. 1, 1990.
West’s bill was “stupid,” said James Duree, a former Pacific County prosecutor and Democrat who recently retired from private practice. Duree said he wrote to West in 1990, suggesting facetiously that the Legislature pass a law making it a crime for legislators to have sex with one another. “I thought they should stop doing sex in Olympia,” Duree said.
Politicians who take extreme positions on sex are not always what they seem, said Duree, 87.
“I saw people like West when I was a prosecuting attorney,” said Duree. “These people who were so goosy towards sex.….. They’re the ones you’ve got to watch,” he added.
During the Gay.com chat on New Year’s Eve, when West had been Spokane’s mayor for a year, the 18-year-old man who’d had a sexual encounter with West on a date in June 2004 said “you wouldn’t be in the position you are in today if the right-winged supporters knew you like to mess around with guys.”
West replied: “Two consenting adults must have the ability to protect their privacy or else the damn sex Nazis will be telling everyone what to do.”
Phil Talmadge, a former Democratic legislator and Washington Supreme Court justice, served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when West was in the Senate. He’s now in private practice in Tukwila, Wash.
Talmadge said he’d heard the rumors about West’s sexual orientation when he was in the Senate but didn’t know whether they were accurate.
“The rumors were there, but none of us knew and it didn’t really make any difference to us,” Talmadge said.
The Seattle liberal said he clashed with West on gay rights and other issues, but developed a “grudging respect” for West’s legislative skills.
“I knew the positions he took publicly, and I think he was pretty aggressive about those positions. I didn’t share his views. I felt a stronger sense of tolerance than he exhibited in his public attitudes about gay people. It was a different viewpoint,” Talmadge said.
On the Judiciary Committee, “people wanted to make criminal virtually everything. It was my job as the chairman to screen the use of the criminal sanction,” Talmadge said. West didn’t serve on that committee, but it served as the gatekeeper for many of the bills regulating sexual conduct that West favored.
Senate Republicans had some aggressive staff members who tried to push the envelope on criminalizing sex, Talmadge said. “We described them as having a prurient interest in prurient interest,” he said with a laugh.
The Judiciary Committee made efforts starting in the mid-1980s to toughen child pornography law and sanctions for sexual offenses against children. But it didn’t go as far as West and some other Republicans would have wanted – including the bill to criminalize teen sex – Talmadge said.
“In the real world, you have two 16-year-olds who engaged in sexual activity and you want to put them both in jail? I think that’s going overboard,” he said. “What we did do is (make it) a crime for someone who’s an adult to have sexual relations with kids,” he said.
In 1995, when allegations of sexual harassment involving Democratic Gov. Mike Lowry and a female aide were published in an independent counsel’s report, West called on the House to launch impeachment proceedings against Lowry.
“The governor should not be held to any lower standard than anyone else in our society. Governors cannot and should not flout the law,” West said. He was dressed down by his own caucus for making the proposal without consulting other Republican leaders.
As a Senate leader, West consistently opposed efforts to expand civil rights protections for gays in jobs and housing. In an interview Wednesday, he said he’s philosophically opposed to legislation that creates “special classes” of rights for minorities, including gays. “I don’t think you should discriminate against anybody. I have never been outspoken against gays, and I’ve never discriminated against gays,” West said, adding that he felt the gay rights bills were unnecessary.
In February 1998, West voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, a ban on gay marriage. Gov. Lowry vetoed the measure, but the veto was overridden and Washington became the 27th state to enact such a ban.
Also in 1998, West got into legal trouble after leaving a threatening voice mail on the telephone recording machine of building industry lobbyist Tom McCabe. “You son of a bitch, you better get me, ’cause if you don’t you’re dead,” a screaming West said on the tape.
West spent $20,000 in legal fees on the ensuing criminal misdemeanor charge. He paid $500 to an Olympia charity and apologized to McCabe in an agreement with the prosecutor’s office in Olympia. He also apologized in a letter to the Spokane community for his outburst.
West’s temper tantrum against McCabe was symptomatic of a conflicted man, said Sinderman, the Democratic political consultant. “West is tortured. He screams his way into power. I have a combination of empathy and distaste for him,” he said.
Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, a Seattle Democrat and University of Washington sociology instructor, saw West’s temper and his fervent opposition to gay rights up close in March 2003. He was Senate majority leader and she was introducing a resolution in favor of International Women’s Day.
“The first part had to do with honoring women of all races and sexual preferences. It was the same language we’d used in past years, and it never had been a problem,” Kohl-Welles recalled.
When the clerk read the resolution, West approached her on the Senate floor.
“He demanded that I pull it right then. I said, what’s wrong? He said it’s this phrase, you can’t do this. The phrase was ‘sexual orientation.’.”
“I was shaken up,” Kohl-Welles said. “The Democrats were in the minority. He said if you don’t (pull it), you’ll never be able to introduce anything else.” West told her the Republican caucus was upset over the language.
Kohl-Welles withdrew the resolution and checked its legislative history – discovering that many Republicans had voted for similar language in previous resolutions that had passed.
West apologized and the resolution passed the next day, Kohl-Welles said.
“He’s quick to react, but then he processes it in his own mind and apologizes,” she added...................................
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