Minnesota Lawyer
Paul Gazelka
On the eve of one of the most closely watched primary elections in the state Legislature, Republican challenger Paul Gazelka is denouncing the tactics of a national anti-gay-marriage group in support of his candidacy.
Gazelka, a former state representative from Baxter, won his party’s endorsement to challenge Sen. Paul Koering, R-Fort Ripley, who is the only openly gay Republican in the state Legislature.
Gazelka, as a legislator, was chief author of a constitutional amendment proposal to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Mailings sent by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) compare Gazelka and Koering. Although Gazelka said the marriage issue is a “cause near and dear to my heart,” he said he doesn’t approve of NOM’s “mean-spirited” mailings.
“Campaign laws forbid me to be aware of what others want to do to ‘help’ me, and early on, I was clear that if issue related advocacy groups were going to independently support me that they should not do negative campaigning,” Gazelka wrote this afternoon on his campaign’s website.
A call to NOM executive director Brian Brown wasn’t immediately returned.
In May, NOM launched a $200,000 television campaign in Minnesota. Brown said his organization “sees Minnesota as the next key battleground state in the fight to preserve marriage in America.”
The results of tomorrow’s GOP primary in District 12 in central Minnesota will complete a tumultuous intra-party campaign. Koering, who is known as a hardworking campaigner, drew unwanted attention over reports of his dinner date in Brainerd with a gay porn actor. The race became all the more tense last month when it was revealed that a state GOP Party researcher had asked the Morrison County Sheriff for law enforcement records related to Koering.
