by Rex Wockner
Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told high-school students in Connecticut Feb. 11 that he doesn't know if his late stepfather, Louis Rove, was gay.
Citing published accounts, a student at Choate Rosemary Hall prep school asked Rove if his stepdad's sexual orientation played a role in Rove's political decisions as the architect of George W. Bush's election campaigns.
Those decisions included instances of capitalizing on anti-gay sentiment and opposition to same-sex marriage to pull certain Republican voters to the polls in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
Rove said he didn't know if his stepdad, who died in 2004, was gay, adding, "I miss him a lot," according to The Hartford Courant daily newspaper.
However, several reports have claimed that the elder Rove was openly gay in Palm Springs in the later years of his life.
In the Oct. 15, 2006, New York Times, for example, columnist Frank Rich wrote: "Every one of his [Karl Rove's] Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from 'The Architect,' the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove's own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians."
