I've been meaning to write about this since it broke last week. It turns out Barney Frank's live-in boyfriend from 1987-1998, a gentleman by the name of Herb Moses, was Fannie Mae's Assistant Director for Product Initiatives. What were his responsibilities? According to National Mortgage News, Moses "helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs."
This was of course, at the same time that Congressman Frank was writing housing and banking laws and as the Boston Globe reported in 1991, Frank was pushing Fannie Mae "to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively."
Why is this a case for gay marriage? From FoxNews.com:
"It’s absolutely a conflict," said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. "He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?
"If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have - or at least what’s not in the stock market - that this would be considered germane," added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow. "But everybody wants to avoid it because he’s gay. It’s the quintessential double standard."
A top GOP House aide agreed.
"C’mon, he writes housing and banking laws and his boyfriend is a top exec at a firm that stands to gain from those laws?" the aide told FOX News. "No media ever takes note? Imagine what would happen if Frank’s political affiliation was R instead of D? Imagine what the media would say if [GOP former] Chairman [Mike] Oxley’s wife or [GOP presidential nominee John] McCain’s wife was a top exec at Fannie for a decade while they wrote the nation’s housing and banking laws."
This may be a case of simple political bias, but maybe -- just, maybe -- if they were married; if there was a sense of permanence in their relationship, more than just boyfriend/boyfriend, there may have been a greater degree of oversight on the potential conflict of interest of their relationship.
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