Just out., January 17, 2003, Page 15, Image 15

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January 17.2003 * fu st Mrtqg
L u iiiìc iv iM in e w s
Floyd Sklaver: What is the reaction to your
being gay in the Republican Party.7
Karl Rohdes Well, I have one [heterosexual]
K arl ’ s M arks
Gay city councilor makes the grade in Lake Oswego
friend who’s a Republican (who) said, “It’s kind
of like being a Jew in the Nazi party.” He said he
was very proud of me but doesn’t understand
how 1 do it.... There are probably an awful lot of
Republicans that don’t know I’m gay
because...there never seemed to be a gixxl way
to work the homosexual agenda into the topic of
transportation funding.
FS: What’s your stand on the environment?
K R : I’m generally an environmentalist in a
sustainable fashion, and I think there are a lot of
Republican principles that fuse into that, such
as “Don’t cause damage that’s going to cost us
more money to clean up in the future.” You’re
just creating a need to raise taxes because we’re
going to have to fix it.
F S: How do you reconcile your views as an
environmentalist with President Bush’s dismal
record on the environment.7
K R: I used this line when I was running for
office: that I’m more representative of the first
120 years of the Republican Party than I am the
last 20 years. The Republican Party was formed
to free the slaves; it initiated, fought for and
achieved a woman’s right to vote; and it was the
party that set aside vast tracts of lands for preser­
vation by Teddy Roosevelt. You look here at
home, and you have people like Tom McCall
signing land-use planning with a Republican
Legislature and the Bottle Bill and the Beach
Bill.... The fact that there may be some recent
shifts in that policy under the current adminis­
tration dcxLsn’t mean you just abandon the party.
I, with a lot of other people, am working very
hard to rescue the party and bring it back to its
nruxJerate nxits.
FS: How so?
K R : There’s an organization called the
Mainstream Republican Party with people like
Gordon Smith and Greg Walden who are mak­
ing efforts right now to lead the party back to its
more centrist nxns. When I decided to run for
the state Senate it was recommended to me that
I might want to read the [Oregon] Republican
Party platform. This is a dtxument that is rough­
ly 22 pages, and the first 16 pages, which are sin­
gle-spaced and in 10-point type, dealt almost
exclusively with abortion and homosexuality. In
reading that, though, and seeing how this
hijacking of the party tcx>k place, I gained a
tremendous amount of
respect for the strategy
employed by the ultra­
right wing. They recog­
nized before anyone else
the power of precinct
committee
persons.
Recently, in the last elec­
tion, because of a “mas­
sive” write-in campaign
by my mother, aunt and
brother, I became a
precinct committee per­
son in my district.
F S : You won with
only three votes?
K R : That’s all it takes.
They [the religious con­
servatives]
recognized
that they have three of
their folks in every
precinct in the state and
that very few people run
for these things. So they
were able to sail in there
and write their names in
on the ballots and, boom,
they were elected.
F S : Where is the Karl Rohde believes the Oregon Republican Party has been hijacked
power in the precinct by the ultra-right wing
committee person?
social issues and return to its underpinnings of
K R : The precinct committee people get
equality issues, economic issues, fiscal policy
together, and they select who the county
chairperson will be. [Then] the county chair-
issues.
people get together, and they decide who the
FS: Do you ever consider leaving the party?
state chair is, and they write the party plat­
K R : No. If my ship has been hijacked by
form. So, very easily they were able to gain
pirates, I’m going to fight them to the death. It’s
control of the party and write a platform to
the warrior in me.
include things that most Republicans,
whether they had strong feelings or not, feel
FS: What overall impression would you
don’t bekmg in the platform. As abhorrent as
like to leave us with?
the direction those folks took the party is, I’ve
K R : I think a lot of people would rather that
got to respect them for figuring out the strat­
egy. It was absolutely brilliant and executed
I constantly identify myself as a gay man and
perfectly. We, the mainstreams and rmxler-
make that my issue, but it’s not. My issue is
transportation policy. I don’t see where my
ates, finally recognize we need to get precinct
homosexuality is relevant to transportation pol­
people elected.
icy. I would never suggest that we restripe the
FS: Where would like to see the Republi­ streets pink. J H
can Party go?
FLOYD S klaver is a Portland free-lance writer.
K R : I think I’d like to see it de-emphasize
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ay Republican. To many people
the term is an oxymoron. But to
Karl Rohde, two-term city coun­
cilor in Lake Oswego, being gay
and being Republican are not
mutually exclusive at all.
One of only three openly gay elected officials
in all of Oregon, his political career began in
1989 when a street near his home was closed
without input from the neighborhtxxl. Frustrated,
he volunteered for one committee after another
until deciding to mn for City Council in 1994.
After being declared the winner by The Lake
Oswego Review, Rohde wound up losing by a
mere 263 votes once the absentee ballots were
counted. Undaunted, he immediately announced
his candidacy for 1996 and won. In 2000 he was
re-elected to a second four-year term.
Last spring he ran for state senator of Dis­
trict 19; he lost the G O P nomination. “I want­
ed to win, but it was a three-way primary with
two moderates and a conservative.”
The handsome 35-year-old, who is single,
was born and raised in Lake Oswego, where he
attended Waluga Junior High and “Lakeridge
Health &. Country Club.” His father was politi­
cally active and friendly with all of the state’s
major Republicans in the 1960s and 70s. From
a very young age, Rohde remembers heated
political discussions and passionate arguments
among his family and friends.
Although he says he knew he was gay at age
10 (“I had a huge crush on the cutest guy in the
class” ), Rohde didn’t come out until he was 30.
An avid ccxik, he loves to entertain friends, a
skill that has been handy in running his success­
ful event-planning business, Precision Events.
Rohde is passionate about the minutia of
transportation planning for the tri-county area.
While City Council is supposed to be a part-time
position with a minimal salary (“we get $128.36
each month with a cost-of-living adjustment
each year that’s about the value of a latte”), he
spends more than 40 hours a week attending
meetings and reading "ungcxlly long documents.”
And although he says his constituents in
Lake Oswego are not bothered by the fact that
he’s gay, his hair color has been another matter:
“I had no idea how many people watch [the
council meetings on public access] cable,
because I had, over the years, made decisions
that affected thousands of people and millions
of dollars worth of real estate and gotten a smat­
tering of, say, 10 to 12 e-mails. Then 1 go and
bleach my hair and, after the first council meet­
ing, 1 got over 200 e-mails from people about it.
And the calls came from as far away as Banks!”
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