Ellen Cohen Cohen supported same-gender partner benefits at the city level as ED of the American Jewish Committee, then as CEO of the Houston Area Women's Center. GLBT activists at kickoff of the Cohen campaign (l-r): David Arpin, Matthew Burrus, Cohen, Fiona Dawson, Alton LaDay, and Alex Martinez. HRC endorsed Cohen—the first time ever they've donated to a non-national candidate.

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At a Houston GLBT Political Caucus meeting early this year, the buzz in the room was palpable as the organization heard from Ellen Cohen, the Democratic candidate for the Texas legislature. Here at last, activists in the room at the Houston GLBT Community Center speculated, was a candidate with a realistic prospect of defeating Martha Wong, the two-term Republican incumbent who, even though she represented a chunk of Montrose, infuriated much of the gay community by supporting the antigay marriage amendment to the state constitution in 2005.

Even before her formal endorsement after the summer vetting procedure, Cohen was appearing before the caucus to seek its support--and, by extension, the approbation of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community and thus its votes. To enthusiastic applause, Cohen told the caucus audience that she would have voted against the Proposition 2, the marriage amendment, had she been serving as the representative from District 134, which encompasses Meyerland, River Oaks, West University Place, the Texas Medical Center, and part of Montrose. It's a stance that Cohen, who has clearly captured the imagination of a significant number of GLBT voters, repeats in stump speeches.

However, if you ask Cohen about issues about equal rights for gay people, you might be disappointed when she doesn't thump her chest and loudly proclaim her support for gay issues, including marriage. That stance, she pointed out in a recent interview in her campaign headquarters in Bellaire, actually reflects the lives of many gay people, who find themselves thinking less about the issue of same-sex marriage than the everyday lives they and their families lead. That is not to say that the first-time candidate is not a stalwart defender of equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. On the contrary, Cohen readily promotes to her support of gay civil rights (including on her campaign website, www.ellencohen.org) and said she is willing to carry the banner at any time it's needed.

"If someone doesn't want to vote for me because I support GLBT rights, that's certainly their right," she said. "Because the other piece is, that most GLBT people I've met are not solely, solely focused on issues of gay marriage."

As an example, Cohen mentioned a same-gender couple who approached her during a recent political event about a topic that was close to them. "Their daughter is about four or five, and their whole issue was public schools," she said. "That's what they cared about right then, the issue around public schools--how supportive I am. I don't even think they asked me about gay-marriage issues. They know, so what's there to ask me?"

Her record speaks for itself: Several years ago, Cohen (an Ohio native who moved to Houston 28 years ago with her husband Lyon and children Marcia and Eric) supported same-gender partner benefits at the city level while she was executive director of the American Jewish Committee, then as president and CEO of the Houston Area Women's Center (from which she is taking leave during the campaign). Last year, Cohen was vocal in her opposition to Proposition 2, which not only banned marriage between same-gender couples, but also anything that confers the same rights as marriage.

"It makes a statement that we all benefit when everybody is inside the tent," she said. "Yeah, I could say that I had lunch with [City Council member and lesbian] Sue Lovell today... I don't want to do that 'Some of my best friends are [gay].' It's not the answer. So I talk about gay rights when it's appropriate, and when people ask me questions, I talk about the rights of all people.

"I think it's disingenuous for me to sit here and say, 'Yeah, let me tell you about that.' I am who I am. I've always been out there, [and] I support, 100 percent, GLBT rights."

Cohen points out that District 134 was one of the few state legislative districts that voted against Proposition 2 in 2005, so Wong's support for the amendment actually contradicted the majority of her constituents. (As one politically savvy local gay blogger, Queer in Texas, has asserted, "My biggest problem with Martha is the fact that she voted in committee to move the gay-marriage ban forward. That was a key vote, which puts her on record as being against gay equality. The fact that she was 'present not voting' on the floor vote just shows that she's a coward as well as a bigot.")

Cohen said she would advocate gay equal rights in the legislature, always a hot-button issue in a body dominated by not just the Republicans, but right-wing Republicans. She admits legal progress for gay marriage is limited with the passage of Amendment 2, because constitutional amendments are harder to remove than a law on the books. Still, Cohen points to social progress as a significant means toward one day overturning the amendment. Part of her plan to promote equal rights for gay people is to try and bring religious and  social leaders together with gay citizens in an effort to promote understanding. While Cohen admits achieving that goal may prove be difficult, she maintains that more moderate members of the faction that opposes civil unions are more likely to be swayed.

"If they sit in meetings, if they realize they're sitting next to a couple who's committed to each other, wants to be able to legally adopt their children, and say to themselves, 'That's not scary. I get that, I think they could move from civil unions to marriage,'" Cohen said. "Maybe what it is, is they'll never move to 'marriage in my church,' but they'll move to marriage at City Hall. And maybe their kids will move to 'marriage at my church.'"

While she supports the right of individuals to hold religious beliefs that may include opposition to homosexuality, Cohen (who is Jewish) makes a distinction between matters of re ligion and matters of state. "No one's saying that your religion can't feel as it does," she said. "Your religion can feel whatever way it wants. But that doesn't include being able to say that people of the same sex can't get married. If the church or the synagogue or the mosque doesn't want to perform it, it [should] still be done in a civil environment."

Cohen's passions prevailed in almost every subject that was broached in the interview, including her opponent Wong, who has received flak, even from her own constituency, for failing to live up to her campaign promises. Instead, many District 134 voters assert, Wong has catered to the right-wing leadership in the legislature. While the topic of her opponent did not incite hostility, it was the statement that Wong is "not quite" a moderate Republican that ruffled Cohen's feathers.

"Not quite being that way?" she said, throwing herself into the topic with all of the gusto of a heavyweight prizefighter. "No, she's far right!"

Point taken. Wong's record doesn't mesh with her campaign promises, which included support for education (she supported education cuts in 2003 and the Republican plan to use the new business tax for property tax cuts, instead of funneling the money to anemic school districts), equal rights for all people (she supported Proposition 2), and public health care (she supported a $200 million cut in the CHIPs, the Children's Health Insurance Program, which removed 180,000 Texas children from receiving state-funded health care and made qualifying more difficult for low-income families).

Cohen, the pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-stem cell research, and pro-education reform candidate, does not apologize for her beliefs, but says there's enough room for compromise for both sides to pass effective legislation that can support progress on gay civil rights, whether or not politicians on the other side actively support GLBT people.

She points to the influx of moderate Republican and Democratic candidates in this election cycle as a positive sign of progress.

"I think that if people get elected to the legislature who are not rooted in their own political ideology and just won't get off the mark, then I think we can bring people together," she said.

These issues of particular concern to gay and lesbian voters includes civil issues such as visitation rights for hospitalized partners. Cohen's husband Lyon passed away three years ago, and as his legally recognized spouse, she was able to help him make important decisions and eventually inherited his estate, a right currently denied to same-gender couples. Cohen said there may be room to provide some of those benefits through the law.

"I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know," she added. "I can only say that there may be ways that legally you can try to put in same-sex partner benefits to see if you can't provide for those same kinds of benefits."

While she includes equal rights for gay people as part of her political platform, she admitted the issue can be volatile. And since gay issues crop up so frequently in Texas politics today (and are likely to again when the legislature convenes in January), does she predict that she would spend a lot of time in Austin and in the limelight fighting for the rights of gay people?

"The answer is, I don't know," she said. "I don't know where it's going to be, [but] I'm not afraid of controversy."
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State representative candidate Ellen Cohen was endorsed early by the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, in recognition of the importance of the District 134 race for community representation. Last month, the Houston Chronicle also endorsed Cohen, the Democrat, over Republican incumbent Martha Wong.

In an apparently unprecedented move, the Human Rights Campaign, the national GLBT advocacy organization, has also thrown its weight behind a local candidate. In July, the D.C.-based group gave $5,000 to the Cohen campaign.
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In September, the Austin-based political website Capitol Inside reported on a poll in the District 134 race:

"Cohen campaign officials and other Democrats have heard that internal polling by Republican Governor Rick Perry shows Wong trailing the challenger by as much as six points. That hasn't been substantiated, however, because Perry's campaign as a matter of policy does not discuss the results of polls that it commissions."