Gay marriage spurs primary challenges

"B-log"

07/31/2006

Conrad deFiebre, Star Tribune Staff Writer,
Star Tribune
Last update: July 30, 2006 – 10:03 PM

In adjoining state Senate districts in socially conservative central Minnesota, two incumbents are facing primary election challenges featuring the same overarching issue: the role of gay people in society.

First-term Sen. Paul Koering of Fort Ripley is up against a fellow Republican, a Brainerd City Council member who says Koering’s homosexuality had nothing to do with his decision to enter the race, but who also criticizes the senator’s support of civil unions for gay and lesbian couples.

Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, winner of nine consecutive legislative elections, is opposed by a retired state trooper whose modest campaign has hit hardest at Johnson’s efforts to keep a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriages and civil unions off the ballot.

Besides Koering and Johnson, only three others among the 179 legislators seeking reelection are being forced to fend off challengers from within their own parties in the Sept. 12 primary. Six legislative incumbents have no opposition at all and a free pass to another term in St. Paul.

But the gay rights issue could also play a role in legislative general election campaigns in November, especially for DFL state senators who have been targeted by marriage amendment proponents.

District 12 race

Koering, a farmer and an operator of a funeral car service, made two Republican runs for the Senate before unseating DFL Senate President Don Samuelson in 2002. He gained GOP endorsement again this year, but Kevin Goedker is bucking that support in a campaign against what he calls Koering’s “liberal voting record.”

Koering insists there’s more to it than that. “He’s running for one reason only—because I’m gay,” Koering said. “I think he is a one-issue candidate.”

Goedker, a 34-year-old Realtor and former Marine in his second year on the Brainerd council, denies that. “I am not a one-issue candidate,” he says on his website, which lists detailed positions on an array of issues, including unqualified support for the marriage amendment.

Koering, 41, has a mixed record of procedural votes on the amendment but says he supports putting it on the ballot so voters can decide. “My voting record fits the area I represent very well,” he said. “I certainly am for family values and fiscal responsibility.”

He has the support of his Senate GOP caucus, said Minority Leader Dick Day, R-Owatonna. “We’re getting ready to do a [literature] drop for him, and we’re all rooting him on,” Day said. “It would be terrible for the Republican Party if he got beat.”

Goedker has been vigorously knocking on doors and marching in parades, campaign skills he learned as a 10-year-old helping his father’s unsuccessful Senate run against Samuelson in 1982. He said there’s nothing personal in his challenge to Koering.

“I’ve been friends with Paul Koering,” he said. “I’ve worked with him and have a lot of respect for him. I hope we can still be friends after this, whatever happens.”

District 13 race

Johnson may face less of a battle against Michael Cruze, who has lost the two previous local elections he has entered and whose slow-moving campaign for the DFL Senate nomination has been hit lately with allegations that he’s really a Republican in disguise.

Cruze has acknowledged posting a lawn sign supporting President Bush during the 2004 campaign, but insists he’s always been a Democrat. That’s something Johnson can’t say: He began his political life as a Republican before switching to the DFL in 2000 and is the only state senator to serve as leader of both the GOP and DFL caucuses.

But Cruze said he’s found scant support among Willmar-area DFLers. “It’s only been Republicans who have stepped up to the plate help me,” he said. “I tried to encourage other people to run, but I stand a better chance of beating him.”

He cites a survey by a group opposing same-sex marriage showing 3-to-1 support of the proposed constitutional amendment in the district. Johnson, he said, has “stepped on a lot of toes” by blocking its progress in the Senate.

Johnson, meanwhile, said he’s campaigning as always, focusing on “kids and jobs, roads and taxes, the basic things of the Legislature.” Both Cruze and the Republican candidate in the Nov. 7 general election, Joe Gimse, have “spent most of their time on the social issues,” Johnson added.

In his appearances at 11 parades, Johnson said, the marriage controversy came up only four times. “The No. 1 issue, over and over again, is: ‘Dean, thank you for getting us a Twins stadium,’ “ he said. “The reception has been very positive.”

Cruze, 61, said he missed the parades. “I plan on knocking on some doors, but I’ve got an uphill battle on a shoestring budget,” he said. If he loses to Johnson, he added, he will back the Republican Gimse in November.

Johnson, 59, is pastor of Calvary Lutheran Church in Willmar and a general in the National Guard chaplains corps. Last winter he was embroiled in controversy over a fellow pastor’s secret taping of his comments—which Johnson later admitted had “sanded off the truth”—about how the Minnesota Supreme Court might rule on the state law defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

But Johnson thinks his more than three decades of public service in several roles will help him with the voters, while Cruze’s 30 years with the State Patrol may hurt.

“If everyone he gave a ticket to voted, I’d be in good shape,” Johnson joked.

Cruze replied that, unlike his conservative politics, “I was more on the liberal side” as a traffic cop.