Board members of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization, said yesterday that former Massachusetts state senator Cheryl Jacques is resigning as president because of differences in management philosophy.
Jacques's resignation comes amid turmoil among gays over the Nov. 2 election, particularly the passage of constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage in 11 states. Some gay rights activists have argued that the Human Rights Campaign and allied groups made a strategic mistake in championing same-sex marriage, or that they made tactical errors in their efforts to defeat the constitutional amendments and support Democrat John F. Kerry's presidential campaign.
 
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Michael S. Berman, co-chairman of the Human Rights Campaign board, said the organization is going through "the same postmortems that all advocacy groups" on the losing side have been undertaking since the election. But he denied that Jacques's departure resulted from any alleged errors in the election.
"It has nothing to do with this past election. Zero. I can tell you that with absolute total credibility," he said.
Board members said that while the organization searches for a new president, the Human Rights Campaign will be headed by two part-time, temporary "coordinators": Berman, who is president of the Duberstein Group, a Washington lobbying firm; and Hilary Rosen, a former chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America.
HRC staffers said last night that Jacques and the board were negotiating the terms of her resignation, including its effective date. Jacques resigned from the Massachusetts legislature to take over the group's helm in January 2004. Since she arrived, the organization has grown to more than 600,000 members and achieved a record budget of $30 million, spokesman Steven Fisher said.
"My priorities were to defeat the Federal Marriage Amendment, expand the organization's membership and fundraising capacity, increase our diversity and maintain a strong voice in the media," Jacques said in a written statement.
Evan Wolfson, executive director of the gay rights group Freedom to Marry, called Jacques "a very strong spokesperson for equality."
"I think she was doing a very good job, but I do think HRC has to regroup and not just focus on Washington politics, but on getting the stories of the families harmed by this discrimination out to the American people," he said.
Berman, Rosen and other board members declined to elaborate on the "differences in management philosophy" they said were behind Jacques's departure. However, some of the organization's donors complained last week that HRC had not been as effective as it should have been in working with smaller gay rights groups around the country to combat the state constitutional amendments.
"For the organization that is considered to be responsible for setting the strategy for the [gay] community, the defeat that occurred on November 2 was stunning," one major donor said. "I think every single gay person in this country is trying to figure out what went wrong."
