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November 26, 2004
After Victory, Crusader Against Same-Sex Marriage Thinks Big
By JAMES DAO
ASHINGTON, Nov. 23 - The warning call came in December 1995. "Do you folks on the mainland know what is going on here?" a friend from Hawaii asked Phil Burress, an antipornography crusader from the suburbs of Cincinnati.
Mr. Burress confessed that he did not. "They're going to legalize gay marriage here, and it's coming your way," the friend said, referring to a case before the Hawaii Supreme Court dealing with the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Mr. Burress, a self-described former pornography addict, had spent much of the 1990's fighting strip clubs and X-rated bookstores. But here was something he saw as a potentially greater threat to his fundamentalist Christian beliefs and traditional family values: something he called the "gay agenda."
"We saw a stepped program, a plan by gay advocates," Mr. Burress recalled. "It would lead to homosexuality being taught in schools as equal to heterosexuality. And we saw that what they couldn't get from legislatures they would try to get by going to court."
And so Mr. Burress became a Paul Revere for the movement against same-sex marriage, not only sounding warnings across the land but also laying the groundwork for a church-based conservative movement that he hopes will transform Ohio politics for years to come.
By January 1996, he had helped organize a meeting of Christian conservatives where a program to combat same-sex marriage was devised. By that fall, they had persuaded Congress and President Bill Clinton to enact legislation defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
Within four years, more than 30 state legislatures had followed suit. And on Election Day this month, voters in 11 states, including Ohio, overwhelmingly passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.
Mr. Burress's organization gathered 575,000 signatures to put the Ohio measure on the ballot in fewer than 90 days, then helped turn out thousands of conservative voters on Election Day. Their support is widely viewed as having been crucial to President Bush's narrow victory in that swing state.
"In 21 years of organizing, I've never seen anything like this," Mr. Burress, 62, said in an interview. "It's a forest fire with a 100 mile-per-hour wind behind it."
It is easy to think of the campaign to ban same-sex marriage as a recent phenomenon, one orchestrated by prominent Christian conservatives and Republican Party officials. But the movement's backbone is built on little-known activists like Mr. Burress, a former union organizer who has devoted the last decade of his life to stopping gay marriage.
To understand Mr. Burress's story is to see not only where his movement has come from, but also where it may be going.
Just days after their thundering victories in the fall elections, Mr. Burress and other Christian conservative leaders met in Washington to discuss next year's constitutional amendment battles, which will focus on about 10 states, including Arizona, Florida and Kansas. They hope those fights will be the prelude to their real goal: amending the United States Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, which could take years.
Beyond that, Mr. Burress plans to take his grass-roots movement in Ohio to a new level, using a computer database of 1.5 million voters to build a network of Christian conservative officials, candidates and political advocates.
He envisions holding town-hall-style meetings early next year in Ohio's 88 counties to identify issues, recruit organizers and train volunteers. With a cadre of 15 to 20 leaders in each county, he says he believes religious conservatives can be running school boards, town councils and county prosecutors' offices across the state within a few years.
"I'm building an army," Mr. Burress said. "We can't just let people go back to the pews and go to sleep."
For someone who can sound so combative, Mr. Burress comes across as anything but. Tall, with thinning gray hair, he exudes a folksy, earnest charm. But he also has an inner toughness developed from years as a union negotiator for truck drivers, and he is clearly willing to play political hardball.
Kelly J. Shackelford, president of the Free Market Foundation, a conservative group that is pushing for a marriage amendment in Texas, calls Mr. Burress one of the movement's heroes because he went up against some of Ohio's most powerful Republicans, including Gov. Bob Taft, who opposed the amendment.
"He had the worst of all worlds," Mr. Shackelford said. "Even Republicans, the people you would have thought supportive, were against him. But the only people who mattered, the people, were for him."
His opponents praise Mr. Burress for shaping issues in ways that are clear and compelling for the average voter. But they also say he distorts those issues, and they say he is closed-minded and intolerant of dissenting views, not to mention alternative ways of life.
"He is pretty frightening, because he and other spokesmen for the campaign believe that if you don't subscribe to their view, there is something morally wrong with you," said Alan Melamed, who managed the Ohio campaign against the constitutional amendment.
Mr. Burress disagrees with such descriptions. "I don't have a homophobic bone in my body," he said. "What I'm concerned about is having these things forced on our culture."
Mr. Burress was raised on a farm in Hamilton County outside Cincinnati. He attended a small Evangelical church two and sometimes three times a week, and married a fellow parishioner when he was 18.
At 14, he said, he found a pornographic magazine on the roadside and became obsessed with seeing more. Every chance he got, he said, he drove into Cincinnati to buy, and sometimes steal, magazines or videos.
Over the next two decades, he had four daughters from two marriages. But he says his obsession with the raunchy fantasy world of pornography ruined both marriages and drove him away from religion.
"I was living a double life," he said.
On Sept. 6, 1980 - a date he recalls as vividly as others remember birthdays or deaths - Mr. Burress attended a sermon given by his new son-in-law, the pastor at an evangelical church. The experience reawakened religious stirrings inside him and he resolved to change his life.
He said he abandoned his pornography habit, started attending church again and began volunteering at Citizens for Community Values, an antipornography group based in Cincinnati.
Within a few years, he was running the group, effectively retiring from the landscaping business and travel agency he owned. In 1998, he was married for the third time, to a woman he met at an antipornography conference.
For anyone who assumes Mr. Burress's political plans will be a boon to all Republicans, Mr. Burress says think again.
Though he strongly supported Mr. Bush's re-election, Mr. Burress says he is furious that powerful Republicans like Governor Taft, Attorney General Jim Petro and Senators George V. Voinovich and Mike DeWine opposed Ohio's marriage amendment. (They asserted that the amendment would harm Ohio businesses by prohibiting employee benefits for domestic partners.)
Mr. Burress attacked those Republicans as "enablers" of what he calls the homosexual agenda, and he has vowed to run candidates against them and anyone else who opposes what he considers pro-family, antiabortion or anti-gay-rights policies.
"I'm not an R or a D," he said. "Both parties are driven by selfishness. They are run by people who are Republican or Democrat because it benefits them or their jobs. Our movement will be built on passion, on values, on fire-in-the-belly morals."
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