Tim Burgess, the former head of the Seattle Ethics and Elections
Commission, has been seen as a strong liberal challenger to city
council incumbent David Della, who has disappointed many progressives
in his first term on the council. Among other things, Della refused to
take the City Light committee after a campaign focused on incumbent
Heidi Wills’s failure of leadership on that very committee; he was a
staunch supporter of a larger new Alaskan Way Viaduct; and he routinely
votes for tax giveaways to companies like Paul Allen’s Vulcan. (Burgess
has raised $164,000 to Della’s $184,000.)
Burgess, however, has a client in his past that won’t sit well in
progressive Seattle. Burgess’s ad firm provided media planning,
copywriting, media buying, and other consulting services to Concerned
Women for America (CWA), a fundamentalist Christian group that’s best
known for fighting against equal rights for gays and lesbians. Gay
former council member, Tina Podlodowski, who has endorsed Burgess, says
CWA is “not a group I could ever support. Clearly, he made a big
mistake.” Among other things, CWA advocated against making emergency
contraception available over the counter, arguing that access to it
would encourage promiscuity; has said that legalizing gay marriage
would destroy the fabric of society; actively opposes the Equal Rights
Amendment; and believes that “politicians who do not use the Bible to
guide their public and private lives do not belong in office.”
The firm Burgess cofounded, now called Merkle/Domain, services
non-profits. According to Burgess, the firm represented CWA for eight
or nine years. “We generally did not have an ideological screen on
clients. We’ve served all kinds of groups, [including] some others that
I don’t always agree with,” Burgess says. According to the Washington
Secretary of State’s corporation listing service, Burgess’s clients did
not include any liberal equivalent of CWA. They did include the African
Wildlife Foundation, Mercy Corps, and the Lance Armstrong
Foundation.
Burgess says that although he does not agree with CWA’s political
views, he was fully aware of those views when he took them on as a
client. “From the very beginning, I rationalized it in my mind [by
saying], okay, this is a nonprofit organization that deserves to
communicate its message just like anybody else.” After some of his
employees complained, “we allowed our employees to opt out of working
on their projects, which I personally took advantage of. I stopped
working on their projects.” Burgess also says he pressed his partner at
the firm, Richard Perry, to drop CWA as a client, which they finally
did in 2004. “I can’t change history,” Burgess says. Perry, contacted
in London on Tuesday, confirmed Burgess’s account of the decision to
initially keep CWA, adding: “I told people not to use the agency as a
place to talk about their particular ideology or philosophy. We had all
different kinds of people there, we had gay and lesbian employees, so
for me it was just strictly a business decision.”
No one would dispute the fact that Burgess’s firm had every right to
take on any client that would pay them. But by allowing his firm to
help CWA produce media and ad campaigns in the critical year of 2004,
Burgess profited from the promotion of a radical right-wing agenda
that, if implemented, would cause profound harm to gays, lesbians,
young people, and women. In 2003, according to its 990 form with the
IRS, CWA spent nearly $8 million on outreach efforts, including
$328,479 to Burgess’s Domain Group. The money, according to the IRS
form, paid for outreach and direct mail to the group’s
constituents.
Burgess’s client list when he owned the Domain Group included
numerous other faith-based organizations. Among them were the Christian
Management Association, which aims to “validate and advocate the
legitimacy of a Christian worldview in management practices within our
culture”; Food for the Hungry Inc., which received grant money from the
Bush administration to promote its “life-saving message of abstinence”
in Africa, where AIDS continues to ravage the population (and where
condoms would accomplish much more than unrealistic anti-sex
messaging); and the Bible League, which seeks Christian converts in
places like China, Africa, and the Middle East.
Burgess has also been haunted by an op-ed piece he wrote for the
Seattle Times in January 2005 in response to Bush’s
reelection. In it, Burgess, a Democrat, argued that Democrats need to
reach out to so-called “values voters” by recognizing and respecting
their core beliefs. What has concerned some is the following paragraph:
“We don’t like abortion. We value the sacredness of marriage between a
woman and a man. We recognize that not everyone agrees with us and we
know the law isn’t a good mechanism to resolve these issues, but moral
persuasion is.”
“The sacredness of marriage between a woman and a man,” or some
variation thereof, has long been standard code for opposition to gay
marriage. Burgess says that’s not exactly what he meant. “The code
language is ‘the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.’ What
I meant was that in the context of the church environment, people of
faith view marriage as between a woman and a man. Does that mean that
in civil law we have to see it that way? No.”
On the campaign trail, Burgess has repeatedly said he supports
marriage equality and abortion rights. He has received endorsements
from many progressive groups and individuals, including the 34th and
46th District Democrats, Podlodowski and gay state Representative Joe
McDermott. Podlodowski says she believes Burgess when he says he
supports marriage equality and other progressive values. She says she
and Burgess “had two rather lengthy discussions on [the gay marriage]
issue because it’s obviously something that means a lot to me. Having
had those conversations, I’ve satisfied myself… that Tim has good,
progressive values,” Podlodowski says. And the gay and lesbian
candidate ratings group SEAMEC gave him a rating of 3—”meets
expectations”—despite his representation of CWA. 