News

Candidate Thanks Log Cabin

Bill Roundy, The Washington Blade

April 16, 1999

Republican candidate Mike Lane, who won the special election for a seat on the Arlington County Board on April 13, prominently thanked a group of gay Republicans during his acceptance speech Tuesday night.

The Log Cabin Republican Club of Northern Virginia, Lane told the Blade, has been "very supportive" in both the latest campaign and the one he ran in the general election in November. Log Cabin NOVA held fundraisers for Lane each time, he said, and during this election the club "adopted" one of the Arlington precincts, working phone banks and staffing the polls in the Arlington Forest precinct, which Lane won by 38 votes. The election was extremely close, with Lane winning 50.55 percent of the vote, or 9,530 votes to the 9,361 garnered by his opponent, Charles Monroe (D). Lane becomes the only Republican on the five-member board.

One of the major gay-related questions put to candidates in the race concerned their support for the county policy of extending insurance benefits to the domestic partners of county employees. In a candidate forum March 18, Lane said that more public discussion on the policy is needed but said that he had reached no conclusions about domestic partnership. He also urged members of the gay community to discuss the issue with him.