Know Thy Enemy

They’ve introduced bigoted legislation, filed referendums, held
rallies, and
raised money—but they’ve never gotten around to
explaining how gay couples actually hurt their marriages. They’ve also allegedly done things
like failed to pay taxes, raised rents on the elderly, and beaten their
wives. They say their battle is a righteous one, but these four
crusaders are short on righteousness and long on catacombs in the
closet.

GARY RANDALL, a former televangelist, is a cofounder and
board member of Protect Marriage Washington, the group trying to repeal
Washington’s new domestic-partnership bill by putting it up to a public
vote with Referendum 71. He’s also the president of Faith and
Freedom—technically three groups: Faith and Freedom Foundation,
Faith and Freedom PAC, and Faith and Freedom Network—which
campaigned in 2006 against Washington’s antidiscrimination bill to
protect gay people from hate crimes. Randall owns a house in Oregon and
is registered to vote there, so he doesn’t really have a stake in
Washington laws.

IN HIS CLOSET: In the week between May 21 and May 28, Randall
asked his blog readers to donate to the referendum four times. But he
didn’t ask them to donate to the organization running the
referendum, Protect Marriage Washington; he asked his flock to donate
to his own personal organization, the Faith and Freedom PAC. The Faith
and Freedom umbrella has been a successful fundraising machine for
Randall and has paid him handsomely—$53,877 in 2006 for an
average of only 15 hours of work a week, for example—but public
records indicate he hasn’t been keeping up with income taxes. He owes
at least $38,491.63, which includes a $2,479.04 Oregon tax debt
from 1991, according to the Clackamas County Clerk’s Office, as well as
two federal tax liens the IRS filed against him in 1990 and another in
2008. Asked by The Stranger to explain the glut of unpaid
taxes, Randall hung up the phone.

JOE FUITEN used to be tight with Gary Randall, but he opted
out of Randall’s campaign for Referendum 71, predicting that voters
would uphold the domestic-partnership bill. “When Israel decided to
enter the Promised Land without God’s blessing, they were soundly
defeated,” Fuiten, the pastor of Cedar Park Church in Bothell, wrote to
supporters. “If I felt that God was telling us to go ahead, I would do
it in a heartbeat.” Instead, Fuiten proposes running an initiative in
2010 to repeal partnership rights for gay couples. He described
same-sex marriage as “anarchy” to the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer in 2004. “In the biblical law, homosexuality is
always condemned,” he said.

IN HIS CLOSET: But how does biblical law apply to housing the
elderly and poor? For decades, Cedar Springs Camp in Lake Stevens
provided low-cost housing, renting houses for no more than $150 per
month to retired missionaries and church folk—until Fuiten’s
church bought the Bible camp and jacked rents by 83 percent over
three years, a lawsuit filed by 19 residents alleged. (As Horsesass.org, which broke the story, put
it in 2006: “Fuiten… took control of its board by assuming $150,000
of debt, promising to run the camp without major changes… But avarice
knows no bounds, and Fuiten has methodically set out to evict the
camp’s small residential community…”) The church denied the
allegations. “They thought they could embarrass me into giving them
everything they wanted just by suing me,” Fuiten told The
Stranger. The dispute was settled out of court this February.
Fuiten thinks coverage of the dispute has been “biased.”

LARRY STICKNEY grasps the value of marriage. He has been
married three times (and divorced twice) since the 1980s. He cofounded
Protect Marriage Washington with Randall, and he’s the one who filed
the referendum.

IN HIS CLOSET: Kitsap County Superior Court records show
that, in 1994, it was Stickney’s wife who needed protecting. His
then-wife Cheryl alleged that he “badly injured” her twice,
breaking her eardrum and injuring her jaw so seriously she thought it
was broken. She also alleged that after they separated, “He’s come over
several times when I wasn’t home and stolen and destroyed things
belonging to my son and myself.” A superior court judge issued a
restraining order against him. Stickney didn’t return calls from
The Stranger asking about these records, but on his website he
contends that preventing gay people from marrying is necessary because
“the happiness and well-being of both the parents and the children are
best served by the family unit.”

MATT SHEA, a 34-year-old Republican state representative from
Spokane, who is a board member of Protect Marriage Washington, wasted
no time introducing legislation in his first term early this winter: He
sponsored a bill to ban Washington from recognizing same-sex marriages.
“Like you, I am concerned that Washington could become a destination
state for those who cohabitate without the benefit of marriage,” Shea
wrote in a letter to his constituents. His bill died without a hearing.
Nonetheless, he plodded on. “I will oppose efforts in the legislature
to dilute traditional marriage,” he wrote.

IN HIS CLOSET: Wasn’t it Shea’s own traditional marriage that
was, uh, diluted when he and his wife divorced 13 months earlier? Shea
has hardly been a good steward of the institution. The Spokane County
Clerk’s Office identified 44 pleadings related to that
divorce—among them, two temporary restraining orders and a
protection order filed against him by ex-wife Lisa. Shea did not
return calls from The Stranger, but the Spokesman-Review detailed some of the scandal last summer: “Matt T. Shea’s wife, Lisa,
was granted a divorce in January after complaining that he treated
her ‘as a possession,’ and was physically and emotionally abusive.
She said Shea insisted she walk on his left side because his
sword, if he had one, would be on his right side. He said he
knows nothing about that, but as a courtesy would walk between her and
traffic. Lisa Shea’s brother-in-law, Tino P. Vargas, swore in court
documents that he saw Matt Shea yell at his wife, grab her arm ‘very
hard and violently,’ and push her into a vehicle.”