By Chad Groening
June 30, 2003

(AgapePress) - A St. Louis Republican says there are several good reasons to be concerned should Dick Gephardt be elected president. He says the Missouri Democrat would support the legalization of homosexual marriage.

Gephardt, a congressman from the Show-Me State, has announced he is a candidate for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and will not be running for another term in the House. Bill Federer, who hopes to win Gephardt's seat in Congress, says the lawmaker cannot be trusted when it comes to the question of same-sex marriage. He says Gephardt has publicly endorsed it in the past.

In 2000, while campaigning to unseat the long-time Missouri congressman, Federer ran a 30-second ad showing C-SPAN footage from a speech Gephardt made to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the nation's capital. In that speech, Gephardt pledged his support for homosexual marriage.

"He was furious -- he threatened all the TV stations," Federer says. "And [the ad] was so powerful [that] people were pulling 'Gephardt' signs out of their yards and putting 'Federer' signs in."

According to Federer, Gephardt then recanted his statements in the ad, saying he was not for homosexual marriage -- which caused homosexuals and their supporters to feel that Gephardt had lied to them and flip-flopped on the issue. As a result, Federer says Gephardt was "getting it" from both sides of the issue.

Federer also thinks it is significant that Gephardt's lesbian daughter, Chrissy, has pledged that she will lobby her father to endorse homosexual marriage. Chrissy Gephardt has quit her job as a social worker and is working full-time on her father's campaign for the White House.

© 2003 AgapePress all rights reserved.

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