News - Local News

POSTED: Friday, Mar. 13, 2009

Brandland: Being gay is genetic, couples deserve rights

Before the state Senate this week approved a bill expanding every right to domestic partners that married couples get, Sen. Dale Brandland heard a lot about the issue from inside and outside of his district.

But the Whatcom County Republican, who represents the 42nd Legislative District - the northern half of the county - said people shouldn't have been surprised by his vote in favor of Senate Bill 5688.

"I guess from my perspective, I've come to the conclusion that people are born gay. I don't think this is something that they just pick up along the way," the former Whatcom County sheriff said. "Once I came up with that kind of conclusion, it wasn't difficult for me to understand that gay people are going to develop feelings for people of the same sex and will want to get into meaningful relationships.

"I thought it was inappropriate to deny them some of the basic rights that relationship entails."

Conservatives who are part of the statewide Faith and Freedom Network, with a tag line that reads: "Advancing Judeo-Christian Values," weren't happy that Brandland might not vote their way on the legislation.

Gary Randall, the organization's president, began writing blog posts on its Web site and sending out e-mails asking members to contact Brandland and two other Republicans, Sens. Cheryl Pflug and Curtis King, whom he said "are not with us."

Meanwhile, The Stranger, a prominent liberal weekly newspaper in Seattle, began waging war in favor of the bill on its blog, the Slog. Locals took to the social networking site Facebook to advocate support of the bill, including former Democratic Senate candidate Stephanie Kountouros, now the public policy coordinator for Mount Baker Planned Parenthood. She was asking people to contact Brandland to offer support for the bill.

Brandland's office tracks only in-district contacts on bills, his staff said. The office heard from 63 people in the 42nd that opposed the bill and 81 people who supported it.

In the end, Brandland voted the same way he has on two similar bills. A few years ago, he voted in favor of the legislation that created a domestic partnership registry in the state. And in 2008, he said yes to legislation that expanded a few hundred rights to those partnerships.

To Brandland, he simply wasn't a swing vote on the issue, he said. And he was aware that the bill's sponsor, Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, fully intended the legislation to be "everything but marriage," as the proposal had been dubbed.

Brandland's 'yes' vote didn't please Randall of the Faith and Freedom Network. Randall quoted the senator on the organization's blog post-vote and then called Brandland "a gay activist's fantasy" who, along with the two other Republicans who voted in favor, "had abandoned their own Republican party and voted against traditional marriage."

Brandland has said in the past that he considers himself a more fiscally conservative and socially liberal Republican.

But he doesn't support marriage for gay couples.

"I basically said I was in favor of going as far as civil unions," he said.