A twisted message
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist
10/31/2004
In a long season of nasty legislative races, the nastiest has to be the campaign being waged against Carl Sciortino.
Sciortino upset the incumbent, Vincent P. Ciampa, in the Democratic primary last month by talking about education, health care, local aid, and civil rights. Ciampa hopes to defeat him Tuesday by running a write-in campaign exploiting an 11th-hour direct-mail blitz by a pack of homophobes that characterizes Sciortino as a ''militant homosexual activist" and a tool of the ''homosexual lobby."
I think what Ciampa's twisted allies are trying to tell the people of Somerville and Medford is that Sciortino is gay. They could have saved the postage. The candidate has made no secret of his sexual orientation or of his opposition to a proposed state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, the real source of the venom spitting his way in the waning days of this campaign.
Sciortino objects to efforts to write discrimination into the Massachusetts Constitution, but that has not been the focus of his campaign. His advocacy of a review of state formulas for funding charter schools, for calculating the minimum wage, for public funding of elections, for determining the percentage of health insurance paid by state workers has won him the support of unions, teachers, and election reform groups.
Those endorsements and others -- he has the support of Massachusetts chapters of the Sierra Club, the National Association of Social Workers, and the National Organization for Women -- undermine Ciampa's assertion that his opponent is waging a ''one-issue campaign."
If Sciortino is such a bold single-issue candidate, why is the right-wing Article 8 Alliance accusing him of hiding his agenda? Its poisonous pamphlets, the ones blanketing Somerville and Medford these days, assert that the ''Homosexual Lobby" is running ''a secret campaign to install a homosexual, anti-Catholic extremist in the state Legislature."
You can be a stealth candidate or a one-issue candidate. I don't think you can be both.
The basis for the charge that Sciortino is anti-Catholic is that he and his partner stood up at Mass and turned their backs on the altar to protest the church's campaign to overturn gay marriage. Sciortino is hardly the only Catholic moved to protest the church's actions in the last few years.
It is not Carl Sciortino but the Article 8 Alliance that is fixated on gay marriage. This is the group mounting a campaign to remove from the bench state Supreme Court Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall and the justices who voted with her last November to recognize the right of same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts.
Ciampa could denounce the tactics of the group that takes its name from the section of the state Constitution that empowers the people to recall public officials for misconduct. He won't. That would require the kind of leadership he has not demonstrated in eight terms on Beacon Hill, where he was known more as a coat-holder for former speaker Thomas M. Finneran than as an independent thinker. That record has more to do with his primary loss than purported efforts by ''homosexual extremists to settle a grudge" with Ciampa, who opposes gay marriage.
In a joint statement last week, state Democratic Party chairman Philip W. Johnston, Somerville Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone, and state Senator Jarrett T. Barrios described themselves as ''sickened by the outrageous and vulgar claims made by the Article 8 Alliance." Would that Ciampa had done the same.