The daughter in this political family is named Rachel Bianchi, a 29-year-old who just headed up her first campaign, a parks levy initiative for King County. Brodeur didn't mention what politicos countywide knew: It was a lackluster effort that drew just 25 percent turnout and went essentially unpublicized. "The parks levy was Rachel's baby; her first time heading up a campaign," Brodeur wrote obliviously.
The political mother is named Jan Bianchi--a name that should be vaguely familiar to gays and lesbians in Washington State. In a short paragraph about Bianchi's political accomplishments--a very short paragraph--Brodeur wrote, "[She] pushed an initiative that would have made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual identity."
The initiative the elder Bianchi pushed was I-677, a 1997 statewide initiative (Brodeur showed up in town in 1999) that would have banned employment discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. Unlike Rachel Bianchi's low-profile parks levy, I-677 was high-profile and, more importantly, a miserable failure.
A pro-gay-rights initiative was a bad idea in 1995 when the group Bianchi led, Hands Off Washington, first floated it. Cal Anderson, the state's first openly gay member of the legislature, helped to shoot it down in early 1995 because, as gay-rights groups had made plain in battles against anti-gay-rights initiatives, voting on the civil rights of a minority was unconstitutional. Hands Off Washington was, in fact, founded on this principle, in order to fight demagogues like Lon Mabon. (The wisdom of this POV was vindicated when Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2 was tossed by the Supreme Court.) In short, civil rights should be the job of principled legislatures (see Civil Rights Act of 1964)--and not electorates.
But Anderson died in August of 1995 and Bianchi immediately began pushing for a gay-rights initiative. Bianchi's personal crusade wound up destroying the organized gay-rights movement in Washington State. I-677 lost by 20 points. And by handing conservative legislators those anti-gay numbers, Bianchi's ill-advised initiative scuttled any hopes of passing a comprehensive gay-rights bill in the legislature, a bill that had come within a single vote of passing in 1993 and 1994. After the defeat, Bianchi took a paper-pushing job in Olympia, and Hands Off Washington changed its name to Equality Washington and quickly collapsed.
Here's hoping the younger Bianchi has better political instincts than her mom. And here's her mom isn't thinking about getting back into politics.
