Last night at the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee monthly meeting, several candidates on the ballot next week (or their surrogates) addressed the 50 or so people in attendance at the Children’s Board meeting room in Ybor City.
But after District 60 House candidate Christopher Cano spoke up about his race (a contested Democratic primary against Russ Patterson, who was not in attendance), Cano was literally called out by two members of the party’s Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual, Transgender and Allied Caucus, Sally Phillips and Marilyn Cappiello.
They challenged him to defend his responding "yes" in a questionnaire that all candidates were asked to complete while at last week’s confab at Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, on whether it should be put in the Constitution that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Cano said he had responded as charged, and that he believed that marriage was between a man and a woman.
Although that sentiment is shared by some of the state's (and the country's) most prominent members of the Democratic Party, opinions are shifting more than ever, as the idea of gay marriage is no longer a wild-eyed concept, but in fact the law in five states and the District of Columbia – and could be by the end of the year in the nation's largest state, California.
Hillsborough GLBTA Chair Sally Phillips told CL Monday night that when Cano came before her caucus last year, he said he would always fight against discrimination. She said her group never got into too much details about what that meant, but she assumed it meant "as a good Democrat" that he would support the rights of same sex partners to marry.
Phillips said that after reading his questionnaire from the Bell Shoals event, she felt like he was “pandering" at Bell Shoals, saying she and her allies always wonder if candidates might say one thing to them in private quarters, and another thing entirely when in front of a different group with different attitudes.
But when contacted via e-mail Monday night, Cano was unrepentant, writing that on the issue of same sex marriage, "marriage is in every major world faith. It predates the US constitution. Who am I as the District 60 representation for this upcoming legislature to change that?"
In fact, the Democrats leading candidate on the ballot this November, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, has explicitly said that she does not favor gay marriage. Neither does the top Democrat in the country, Barack Obama.
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2010.