There goes the neighborhood
By Barbara Taormina, North Shore Sunday | February 10, 2006
Two days after Jason Robida walked into a gay bar in New Bedford and attacked three people with a hatchet and a gun, Manchester-by-the-Sea resident Tom Lang was on the phone with Gov. Mitt Romney’s press secretary.
Lang wanted to know why the governor hadn’t yet released a statement consoling the victims and reassuring New Bedford’s gay community that everything possible was being done to hunt Robida down.
"We were concerned," says Lang. "We didn’t know where this guy was." Romney’s press office wasn’t sure when a statement would be released or if the governor would have anything at all to say about the horrific hate crime that was putting Massachusetts in the headlines across the country.
So Lang fired off a brief letter to Romney’s press office.
"I find the lack of timeliness by Gov. Romney in addressing the victims and their families, the gay community and the town of New Bedford shameful and ask for an immediate response from his office," Lang wrote.
Lang also offered to let Romney and Lt. Gov. Kerry Healy use his Web site, KnowThyNeighbor.org, to directly address the gay community.
It was a step in a new direction for Lang, 42, who has already managed to make a mark on the state’s political landscape with his Web site, which lists the names of 140,000 people who signed an initiative petition to change the state’s constitution and ban same-sex marriage.
But then again, the battle lines keep changing for Lang and others who are fighting to preserve those marriage rights in Massachusetts.
Lang, who launched KnowThyNeighbor.org last September with Aaron Toleos, says he wanted first and foremost to make sure everyone had access to information.
"It’s very cut and dry," says Lang. "The people who signed this petition are against equality. It’s that simple."
Both Lang and Toleos say the list is meant spark some dialogue among people who may be on different sides of the issue. If your neighbor, your teacher or your dry cleaner show up on KnowThyNeighbor.org’s site, they hope you will ask them what’s up - why did they sign a petition against equal rights for gay and lesbian couples?
"If you know someone who’s signed, it’s incumbent on you to have a conversation with that person," says Lang.
But from the beginning, both Lang and Toleos strongly discouraged anyone from harassing or harming anyone who signed the petitions. In fact, that plea is part of KnowThyNeighbor.org’s mission statement. But, if people decide they don’t want to do business with someone who signed, or donate to a cause they might be championing, well, that’s another matter.
Lang says he and his partner, Alex Westerhoff, 36, who have been together for 18 years, will definitely be keeping track and considering who they’ll be doing business with and whose causes and charities they’ll support. And that’s something to consider. The two men run a highly successful antiques business in Essex and have plenty of disposable income that allows them to be as generous as they want.
Lang says people have to decide for themselves what to do if someone they know has signed the petition. The most important thing was to make sure the names were available to the public.
But no sooner was the ink dry on those petitions than Lang and Toleos found they had a new battle.
Stories of fraud and forgery started to surface. People whose names showed up on KnowThyNeighbor’s Web site say they never signed the anti-gay marriage petition. Some say they never signed any petition at all.
Knowtheyneighbor’s focus shifted from publishing the names of those who opposed same-sex marriage to helping those who had been victims of fraud in the state-wide petition drive. And that’s no easy task. Lang says the fraud with this petition drive is rampant.
Although cleaning up that mess continues, it’s really an attempt to correct the record. The next battleground for gay marriage will be in the Massachusetts Legislature, where 25 percent of the reps and senators must approve the proposed amendment at a constitutional convention this spring. If the proposal gets the 50 votes needed, it will face the same test at a second convention. If the amendment clears those hurdles, it will go to the voters in November 2008.
Lang has been meeting will state lawmakers to discuss where they stand and how they’ll vote, and he’s already planning to do some fund-raising for candidates who will oppose the amendment.
It’s a long and ever-changing struggle for Lang, who seems to be adjusting nicely to a leading role in the fight for equal rights. "I’m starting to understand where I can and can’t put my foot in the water," he says. "Where there’s a need, I’ll be there."
Lang saw a real need to step in with the New Bedford case. Not only was nothing being done to reach out to the victims, nothing was being said by the state’s top political leaders.
On a personal level, Lang plans to raise some money to help the three men hurt in the New Bedford attack.
Although one of the victims, Robert Perry, was released from the hospital the next day with a long gash on his face and a bullet hole in his back, the two other men remain in the hospital.
On a political level, Lang says he had to challenge Romney to say something. And three days after the attack, the governor did finally speak up. "All acts of violence are deplorable, particularly if they are motivated by hatred or bigotry. My hope is the perpetrator responsible for this heinous crime in New Bedford is held accountable for his actions," Romney says in his press release.
"It’s nothing," says Lang, who says he’s already considering leaving the country if Romney’s bid for the White House actually succeeds.
Taking away
Stepping up and demanding a response from the governor is something that now seems kind of natural to Lang, who says he has learned a lot over the past five months.
A turning point might have been back in September when Lang asked Michele Tassinari, the legal consultant for elections at Secretary of State William Galvin’s office, if he could post the names of people who signed the petitions.
Lang says that Tassinari not only told him that it was legal, she also told him it was his job to do it.
And with that reassurance, KnowThyNeighbor was off and running.
But as soon as the names started going up online, same-sex marriage foes started complaining about dirty tricks and intimidation.
Kristian Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute - which is heading the campaign to end same-sex marriage - says there was never any need to post the names since the information is already available at the secretary of state’s office.
Other supporters of the amendment say KnowThyNeighbor.org damaged the entire petition process and that voters would think long and hard before signing petitions in the future.
But that didn’t draw any apologies from Lang.
"This petition isn’t asking for rights," says Lang. "We have those rights. This petition is asking that those rights be taken away." And that’s something Lang says people should have thought long and hard about before they decided to sign.
Although the Massachusetts Family Institute initially slammed KnowThyNeighbor.org, they now say that Lang and Toleos have done them a favor. They have asked all their supporters who signed the petition to check the Web site to make sure their names are included.
The Family Institute has also urged people who feel they have been intimidated or harassed as a result of KnowThyNeighbor.org’s list to contact Attorney General Tom Reilly’s office.
But the number of those people has been surprisingly small, given all the talk about intimidation.
"We’ve gotten about five complaints to our Civil Rights Division," says Terence Burke, a spokesman for Reilly’s office.
Finding fraud
The Massachusetts Family Institute may be trying to channel complaints against KnowThyNeighbor.org to the attorney general’s office, but they also have some big worries of their own. Over the past couple weeks more and more people have come forward to say they were duped into signing the petition, and had they realized the it was for an amendment to ban same-sex marriage, they would have walked away.
Lang says he has heard from around 600 people who say they were tricked by being told they were signing a petition for something else. MassEquality, another group working to defeat the proposed amendment, says that out of 10,000 signatures they found 2,000 names that were fraudulent.
Those who have come forward to complain say workers collecting signatures in front of grocery stores often said their petitions were to allow the stores to sell beer and wine. Others were told they were actually signing a petition to support gay marriage.
Lang says that workers collecting signatures in front of Target in Danvers, an area that was hit hard, told people their petitions were to lower taxes.
"There was fraud with these petitions in every area of Massachusetts," says Lang.
And some people whose names have shown up on petitions say they never signed anything at all - ever.
Last week, the Beverly Citizen reported that five residents of that city have filed affidavits to have their names removed from the petition. Beverly resident Leslie Leathersich was part of that group.
"I typically wouldn’t sign anything like that," says Leathersich in an interview with theCitizen. "Companies come in on the left or right to get signatures. I have no idea how my name got on that petition. Therefore, how did my name get on something that anyone who knows me knows I would never sign?"
Lang says the problem is with Arno Political Consultants, the company the Massachusetts Family Institute hired to collect signatures.
Arno’s reputation probably should have preceded them. The organization has been charged with fraud in petition drives all around the country, particularly in California, where initiative petitions are a common way of doing government business.
Lang says Arno bussed and flew in workers from around the country and paid them $1.50 for each signature they collected. Signature collectors allegedly made up to $1,200 a day, and Lang says they would sometime brag about how they were able to defraud gay people into signing a petition to take their own rights away.
Lisa Barstow, the spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Family Institute, says Arno only collected about 25 percent of the 140,000 approved signatures on the petitions.
And Kristian Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, says his organization doesn’t believe the allegations of fraud are genuine because the signatures haven’t been challenged.
"The secretary of state has certified the signatures and said they are all valid," says Mineau. "This was one of the greatest signature drives in the history of the state and the allegations of fraud are nothing more than an attempt by the opposition to smear that campaign."
Still, VoteOnMarriage.org, the organization that managed the petition drive for the Massachusetts Family Institute and its allies in their fight to end same-sex marriage, have promised to cooperate with any investigation into petition fraud.
Badge of shame
Despite that promise, there probably isn’t much for VoteOnMarriage.org to worry about legally.
According to Lang, the attorney general’s office has said it doesn’t intend to investigate or challenge the petition.
So for KnowThyNeighbor.org and Lang, it’s on to the next step - which will be to lobby state lawmakers as they head into a constitutional convention.
Lang says he’s ready. Actually, after going toe-to-toe with Bill O’Reilly on the caustic commentator’s television show a few weeks ago, Lang says he’s ready for just about anything.
But it’s been a process and Lang admits he’s grown a lot more determined over the years. And he’s changed.
"Alex and myself were the first out-of-state couple to do the civil union thing in Vermont. That used to be my badge of honor, now it’s my badge of shame," says Lang, who will no longer accept second-class status.
Although he says he understands why older members of the gay community may be reluctant to take a harder stand, he’s not.
It’s a role that comes with risks, as the attack in New Bedford points out.
"New Bedford put a human face on hate crime and discrimination," he says. But hate crimes and discrimination are something that the gay community knows well.
The Fenway Community Health Center in Boston tracks the numbers of hate crimes and incidents of violence against gays and lesbians. Lang says they saw a rise in 2004 during February and March, the months when the first Constitutional Convention on same-sex marriage took place.
Emily Pitt, the coordinator of the health center’s violence prevention program, says those two months accounted for one-third of all violent incidents reported in 2004.
"It’s not the fact that same-sex marriage is being discussed politically so much," says Pitt. "It has more to do with the fact there’s a lot of anti-gay rhetoric being used, a lot of anti-gay protesters outside the State House and a lot of very public anti-gay language."
Lang says it’s frightening, but it’s not the time to sit back and rest and let the amendment just move to a general election.
When he was on O’Reilly, the one big question that kept getting shouted his way was the same question that many people who don’t understand the entire issue always seem to ask - why not just let the people vote?
For Lang, the answer is pretty clear.
"You don’t let the majority decide the rights of the minority," he says. "End of story."
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