Two years after Urvashi Vaid's protest at President Bush's AIDS speech, and after the White House had barred her from the signing of the hate-crimes law (Struck from the List), the door opened a little. Then the President's own allies tried to slam it shut. The proof sits in a White House folder that has never been told as a story.
A meeting in an election year
On February 13, 1992, Robert Mosbacher, the former Commerce Secretary who had just become chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign, met gay and lesbian leaders to talk about gay and AIDS issues in the 1992 race. With Mosbacher and one of his deputies were Vaid, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; Jeff Levi, her predecessor there and now director of government affairs for the AIDS Action Council; and Peri Jude Radecic, the Task Force's deputy director of public policy.
The next morning the Washington Times reported it in its "Inside the Beltway" column under the heading "Historic moment," describing the Task Force's representatives as "ecstatic" after a "breakthrough meeting." Robert Bray of the Task Force called it historic: "1988 was a very different year. Our phone calls weren't returned even by the Democrats." It came at a delicate time for the President: Bush was facing a primary challenge from the right, and religious conservatives were an important part of his coalition.
The letters
The reaction was fast. That same day, February 14, the conservative consultant Gary Jarmin faxed a memo to two campaign officials. If the column was accurate, he wrote, the meeting had "got to be one of the most moronic ideas I've seen in over 22 years of politics."
On February 19, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Morris Chapman, and Richard Land, who led the convention's Christian Life Commission, wrote to the President himself. They recalled "two similar incidents in April and August, 1990" (April was the hate-crimes signing that the Task Force attended without Vaid), and said they had been told then that the invitations were the work of "a misguided, overeager staff member acting on her own." Now they asked the President "to disavow any support or sympathy for the homosexual civil rights agenda."
Beverly LaHaye, president of Concerned Women for America, wrote to the President about the meeting too. In a follow-up letter on February 25 she told him that his campaign had "absolutely nothing to gain by meeting with leaders of the homosexual movement."
Where the letters ended up
All of this landed in one folder: the speechwriters' background file for the President's speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 3, 1992. The clipping that named Vaid, the fax, and the letters were what the White House gathered as it prepared to face an evangelical audience in an election year.
The folder shows what Vaid's visibility cost and what it meant: two years after the sign, a gay leader the White House had barred from a bill signing could get a meeting with the President's campaign chairman, and major religious conservative groups treated that meeting as a crisis.
Sources
- Bush Presidential Library, speechwriting files, "National Association of Evangelicals 3/3/92 [OA 7569] [3]" (National Archives, NAID 323153921), including the Washington Times "Inside the Beltway" clipping of February 14, 1992, Jarmin's memo of the same day, the Southern Baptist Convention letter of February 19, 1992, and Concerned Women for America's letter of February 25, 1992.
- The Gayly Oklahoman, June 1, 1993, a timeline that includes the Mosbacher meeting (Gateway to Oklahoma History).
