Republican State Sen. Ashburn says he’s gay, but won’t support gay rights legislation

By Susan Ferriss
The Sacramento Bee

In the end, Sen. Roy Ashburn said he decided he owed his constituents an explanation.

He went on a radio show first thing Monday morning to talk about his sexual orientation.

Then the Bakersfield Republican returned to the state Senate floor, where colleagues greeted him with handshakes and hugs.

"I'm gay. Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long," Ashburn, 55, told KERN conservative radio host Inga Barks.

Ashburn, who has voted consistently against gay-rights measures, last week refused to address reports that he was at a gay bar in Sacramento before his 2 a.m. arrest Wednesday for driving under the influence.

He told Barks he previously saw no reason for residents of his district to know details of his personal life.

But following his arrest, bloggers and public figures began openly discussing his visits to gay bars in Sacramento. He decided over the weekend to discuss the issue publicly.

"I felt with my heart that being gay did not affect, would not affect, how I do my job," Ashburn said on the radio. "Again, what happened through my own actions the other night changed all that."

Senate GOP leader Dennis Hollingsworth of Murrieta, a social conservative, spoke with Ashburn in the Senate. Hollingsworth did not return calls for comment, and Ashburn left the floor without talking to reporters.

On the radio, Ashburn, the divorced father of four, defended being secretly gay while voting against gay-rights proposals.

He said he voted the way he believed most constituents wanted him to vote.

"I have always felt," he said, "that my faith and allegiance was to the people, there, in the district, my constituents."

"As each of these individual measures came before the Legislature I cast 'no' votes, usually 'no' votes," Ashburn said, "because the measures were almost always about acknowledging rights or assigning identification to homosexual persons."

Ashburn has not been a vocal opponent of gay rights recently, but in 2005 he hosted a rally in Bakersfield, while running for Congress, and denounced gay marriage and domestic partnerships.

As a legislator, Ashburn has voted against bills to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation at work, in housing and public accommodations, among others.

California's first openly gay elected legislator, former state Sen. Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, was visiting the Senate floor Monday and spoke with Ashburn.

She suggested Ashburn was going through a "painful" process, and that she doesn't expect him now to vote for every gay-rights bill that comes up while he finishes his term this year.

"I think that if you are ashamed," she said, "that you often do not value the civil rights of the group you belong to because you're ashamed to be in that group."

"I hope that now that he has taken that first step," Kuehl said, "that he'll see that we're actually a pretty fabulous group and totally deserving of full civil rights."

Kuehl said coming out is "such an important step for your own wholeness."

"It's just like race or anything else, where you try to get away with being somebody else and then you can't," she said. "Then you find out how wonderful it is being yourself."

Leaders of gay-rights groups, including the gay Log Cabin Republicans, empathized with Ashburn but didn't absolve him of his votes.

"He needs to try another excuse. He wasn't reflecting his constituents last year when he voted for (increasing) taxes" to help fill a budget deficit, said Charles Moran, the national spokesperson for the Log Cabin Republicans.

"His votes impacted my life," the Los Angeles-based Moran said. "He did make life more difficult for those of us who are openly gay."

Moran said Ashburn's revelation is the latest example of politicians who admit they're gay only when caught in a scandal or arrest.

"In Sacramento and in Washington," Moran said, "there is still a shroud around homosexuality and a taboo. It's all about image. You can't be true to yourself. You can't be authentic."

Moran, 29, said he will urge acceptance of homosexuality at a GOP state convention this weekend in Santa Clara.

Benjamin Lopez, state lobbyist for the Traditional Values Coalition, said that the coalition's founder, the Rev. Lou Sheldon, is offering to counsel Ashburn to help him turn away from being gay.

"I don't know why Roy strayed," said Lopez, who appeared with Ashburn at the anti-gay marriage rally in 2005.

"I think it's more sad than hypocritical," Lopez said. "We hope he comes to terms with whatever is making him make a choice to be a gay man."

The gay-rights group Equality California issued a statement inviting Ashburn to "use his experience to educate the people in his district on why he deserves the same rights and privileges as a gay man as any other Californian."

"People elected him to lead," said Geoff Kors, the group's executive director.

Kors said other legislators in conservative areas have voted for gay-rights measures and gone on to win elections.

Bakersfield residents, Kors said, are not as uniformly anti-gay rights as portrayed.

"I would be shocked," Kors said, "to see if there is any polling that shows that most people in his district believe that anyone should be fired from their job because of their sexual orientation or kicked out of public accommodations because of their sexual orientation. And yet he voted against bills to prevent that."

Phot Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli