Is Vicky Hartzler the Most Anti-Gay Candidate in America?

She’s hitting her Dem opponent—an architect of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—for caving to the “extreme agenda” of the “gay movement.”

Vicky Hartzler, a Republican running for Congress in Missouri, could be the most anti-gay House candidate in America. | <a href="http://vickyhartzler.com/about-vicky/3/">VickyHartzler.com</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Is Vicky Hartzler the most anti-gay House Republican candidate in America?

Hartzler, who’s running in Missouri’s 4th Congressional District, opposes gay marriage, hate-crimes laws, and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Those positions are common among congressional Republicans. But Hartzler has done more than merely take the standard GOP positions opposing gay rights—she has made a name for herself as an anti-gay crusader. Now she’s locked in a surprisingly close campaign with longtime Dem Rep. Ike Skelton, who was an architect of DADT. That’s right: Even in the district with perhaps the most anti-gay Democrat in the House, the Republicans still managed to nominate a candidate with a more anti-gay record.

In 2004, Hartzler drew national and international attention for her work in the campaign for a constitutional amendment in Missouri to ban gay marriage. The amendment was the first of its kind and passed—by a huge margin—in August of that year. The Human Rights Campaign and other national gay rights groups had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the state to campaign against the amendment. Hartzler was quoted in national and international media celebrating her victory for “traditional marriage.” That November, 11 other states followed Missouri’s lead. 

Doug Gray, a political consultant who was on the other side of the Missouri amendment fight, says anti-gay bias is central to Hartzler’s identity. “It’s a core issue for her,” he says. “Vicky is biased. She has always been very motivated by this issue.” A spokesman for Hartzler’s campaign says she’s “not prejudiced against anyone”: “She just thinks certain things are a traditional part of society—marriage being one of them.”

Hartzler’s amendment was a bit of a red herring: Gays would not have been able to marry in the state, regardless. After all, Missouri is one of many states where you could still be fired for being gay, and the state has no law granting hospital-visitation rights for gay couples. Gay rights supporters had a hard time getting across the point that, since Missouri has a state law banning gay marriage, gays and lesbians wouldn’t be able to get married even if the amendment failed. Hartzler was deliberately confusing the issue, Gray says. But more importantly, the gay marriage battle distracted local advocates from more immediate fights—such as seeking employment non-discrimination rules and hospital visitation rights. “Vicky was at the forefront of this manipulation,” Gray says.

Since the Missouri amendment’s passage, Hartzler’s been a go-to quote machine whenever there is national news about gay marriage rights. When voters in California passed Proposition 8 in 2008, a “glad” Hartzler told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she doesn’t believe gay rights issues are civil rights issues. The “color of someone’s skin doesn’t change,” she said. But, she added, there is debate about whether homosexuality is a “lifestyle or they were born that way.” 

In the primary, Hartzler and her opponent were “constantly in a battle over who was more anti-gay,” Gray says. Now Hartzler’s trying to show she’s more anti-gay than Skelton. She acknowledges that they’re on the same page regarding DADT (she says repealing it “puts us at risk“), but Hartzler’s been trying to push another charge. She argues that Skelton “allowed” hate crimes legislation to be attached to a defense authorization bill in 2009 in order to advance “the extreme agenda items of the gay movement.” Skelton was “catering to the desires of gay rights groups,” says Steve Walsh, a spokesman for Hartzler’s campaign. (At the time, Hartzler called the decision a “terrible example of liberals using the good will of our men and women in uniform to advance their radical agenda.”)

Despite Skelton’s DADT record, some activists prefer him to Hartzler. “Ike Skelton has not been a friend of the LGBT community, but he does not wake up in the morning thinking about what he can do to harm the LGBT community,” says Paul Guequierre, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign. “He hasn’t been with us most of the time. But [Hartzler] is vehemently anti-gay.” She also has a fair chance of winning. Nate Silver, the New York Times‘ polling guru, gives Hartzler around a 1-in-3 shot. Media reports suggest that Skelton’s own internal polls only show him with a single-digit lead, while Republican internal polling reportedly shows the race tied.

In addition to her work opposing gay rights, Hartzler has pushed for other Christian right causes. In 1999, as a state representative, she backed a bill that would have allowed for prosecutors to charge women who obtained late-term abortions with murder. The law, which was vetoed by a Democratic governor, would also have permitted second-degree murder charges to be filed against doctors who performed such procedures. In 2000, Hartzler was also a leader in the fight against Missouri ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, a federal constitutional amendment that would have formally provided for equal rights for women. In 2008, she wrote a book, Running God’s Way, outlining the “Christian” way to campaign for office.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate