Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe Is Getting Gay-Married Today

Kolbe and Foley

Former eleven-term Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) has been "living in sin" with his Panamanian lover, Hector Alfonso, for eight years. Today they will legally wed at the Cosmos Club in DC. (It's still illegal for same sex couples to marry in Arizona, although recent polling shows 55% of Arizonans support marriage equality.) Kolbe is the first gay congressman who voted for DOMA in 1996 to get married. Back then, Kolbe was a closeted mainstream conservative-- one of many in the House Republican caucus who, for one reason or another-- felt they had to vote against the interests of the LGBT community. The only "out" Republican-- and the only Republican-- to oppose DOMA was Steve Gunderson (R-MN), who had been publicly outed by raging homophobe "B-1 Bob" Dornan on the floor of the House, in an attempt to humiliate him. And the Republicans weren't the only bigots that day. Nancy Pelosi only managed to muster 66 Democrats to oppose DOMA.

Among the Republican closet cases voting for Bob Barr's so-called Defense of Marriage Act were then-closeted Reps. David Dreier (R-CA), Mark Foley (R-FL), Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Dave Camp (R-MI), Jim McCrery (R-LA), Phil English (R-PA), Denny Hastert (R-IL), and Bill Paxon (R-NY). This week, Kolbe told the Washington Blade "Two decades ago, I could not have imagined such an event as this would be possible. A decade ago I could not imagine that I would find someone I could be so compatible with that I would want to spend the rest of my life with that person. So, this is a very joyous day for both of us." Ironically, even though they’ll be legally married, Kolbe will still be unable to sponsor his spouse for residency in the United States because of the DOMA legislation he helped pass.

Yesterday I had a pleasant talk with one of those former closet cases/former congressmen, Mark Foley. Of course, he was genuinely happy for his old friend Kolbe. "Any time people find love," he told me, "they need to celebrate it. And he's not only celebrating it, he's memorializing it with this ceremony." The two used to travel together frequently but have lost touch in recent years. They were members of the moderate Republican Ripon Society and of the House Republicans' Tuesday Group. "We were called the Tuesday Group but we met on Wednesdays. People used to ask if we were hiding from our friends, the rednecks," laughed Foley who regrets that so many of his colleagues from the Tuesday Group have been forced to turn sharply right more recently, for the sake of political expediency (or survival). There were around 40 members then, which, according to the New Republic "provided a private forum for the party’s more moderate members, and, in its own quiet way, it pushed back against the Republican leadership, preventing it from running off increasingly radical rails... While the Tuesday Group occasionally pushed moderate legislation, members freely admit that its greatest impact was behind the scenes. Tuesday’s members worked to squash measures that would inevitably divide the party-- like strict restrictions on abortion and deep cuts to spending on scientific research or education-- 'bills that would never have had any workability and would just further drive the wedge between us,'" explained Nancy Johnson, then a moderate Republican from Connecticut. Foley remembers that he and Kolbe were members, as were Fred Upton, Mike Castle, Sue Kelly, Mark Kirk, Charlie Bass...

Just before the vote for DOMA on July 12, 1996, there was a Democratic Motion to Recommit, an attempt to ameliorate the negative aspects of the bill. It failed 164-249 but most Democrats (134) voted for it, as did 30 Republicans, mostly Tuesday Group members. The only Republican closet cases who voted for DOMA but also took the brave stand of crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats on the Motion to Recommit were Kolbe and Foley-- NOT Dreier, Rohrabacher, Camp, McCrery, English, Hastert or Paxon, each of whom voted NO. Foley's proud he voted for the Motion but he knows he should have opposed DOMA. "It was always," he told me, " a vote I wish I could have undone... It's a vote I've always regretted." He then reminded me that both he and Kolbe also voted in favor of domestic partnerships for DC and that "very clearly, Hillary Clinton has just evolved on this topic last week."

Kolbe's come a long way. Mazel tov! Watch his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month:

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Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) Who Once Voted For DOMA Is Getting Married To A Man Next Month

Here's one homophobic asshole whose mind Kolbe won't be able to change anytime soon

I had already ended my time as the pop music critic for The Advocate in 1996 when Arizona Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe came out as gay. But I still recall the stir around the magazine because they had decided to publicly "out" Kolbe after he voted for DOMA, which was meant to prevent gay couples from marrying. Since almost everyone in Washington already knew Kolbe was gay, the homophobic vote seemed especially hypocritical. Kolbe decided to beat The Advocate to the punch by calling a press conference and announcing he was officially out of the closet.

Within days of the vote on the Defense of Marriage Act, they began a blistering campaign on the Internet to compel Mr. Kolbe to disclose that he himself was gay, a practice known as outing.

The campaign reached its peak last week with a full-page ad in the Washington Blade, a newspaper that reaches a nationwide gay audience, calling on "all closeted gay and lesbian members of Congress" to "end your silence and defend your community."

On Thursday night, Mr. Kolbe spoke.

He also spoke yesterday-- at the Senate Judiciary Committee, this time urging senators to include gay couples in the immigration bill they're working on. He and his partner, Hector Alfonso, are getting married in May.

Kolbe, a Republican who represented the Tucson area in Congress for 11 terms, has a partner from Panama who had to leave the United States after his work visa expired, bringing his teaching career in this country to an abrupt halt. Under current law, Kolbe could not sponsor his partner for a family reunification visa.

Kolbe's partner was able to return to the United States from Panama a year later after obtaining an investment visa, which allows immigrants who invest in new U.S. businesses to live here. But Kolbe said the process was long and expensive, costing more than many people can afford to spend.

"Our laws should not separate American citizens from their loved ones for such unacceptably long periods of time," Kolbe told the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is holding a series of hearings on an 844-page immigration reform bill drawn up by a bipartisan group of eight senators. Among the bill's authors are Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

The committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has introduced separate legislation, the "Uniting American Families Act," that would allow gay Americans to sponsor their foreign-born partners to come to the United States using family reunification visas. That controversial provision is not part of the sweeping reform bill, although gay rights' advocates are urging that it be included.

"While the bill you are considering is an excellent starting point for reform, I submit to you that it is still incomplete," Kolbe told committee members. "Families like mine are left behind as part of this proposal. Equally important, U.S. businesses and our economy suffer because of the omission of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families from the bill introduced last week."

Kolbe's come a long way since voting for DOMA, as has public opinion (not to mention France and Delaware, each of which legalized marriage equality earlier today)... but his party hasn't. The vast majority of Republicans in Congress are still hateful and virulent homophones-- or at least pretending to be-- and oppose marriage equality and immigration equality. Let's see if he can convince any of the Republican closet cases Congress-- like Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Aaron Schock (R-IL), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Dave Camp (R-MI), etc.-- to support the LGBT community even before being officially outed.

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