Gaytoday.com

Arlen Specter, a gruff, independent-minded moderate who spent three decades in the U.S. Senate but was spurned by Pennsylvania voters after switching in 2009 from Republican to Democrat, died on Sunday of cancer, his family said. He was 82.

Specter had announced in August a recurrence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system. His son Shanin Specter confirmed his death.

Resilient, smart and aggressive, the former prosecutor frequently riled conservatives and liberals on his way to becoming Pennsylvania’s longest-serving U.S. senator. He was elected to five six-year terms starting in 1980. He left the Republican Party because he said it had become too conservative.

Specter steered a moderate course during an era when the two major U.S. political parties became increasingly polarized, and often broke with his party. His sometimes testy demeanor and opportunistic maneuvering earned him monikers like “Snarlin’ Arlen” and “Specter the Defector.”

In 2009, Specter left the Republican Party after 44 years when he concluded he could not win his party’s primary in Pennsylvania in 2010 against a conservative challenger. But his bid for re-election in 2010 ended in failure when he was beaten by a liberal challenger for the Democratic nomination.

After President John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Specter served on the Warren Commission that investigated the shooting, and he helped devise the disputed “single-bullet” theory” that supported the idea of a lone gunman.

During his lengthy Senate career, Specter was crucial in increasing U.S. spending on biomedical research.

He helped get one conservative, Clarence Thomas, confirmed as a Supreme Court justice in 1991, while torpedoing the Supreme Court nomination of another conservative, Robert Bork, in 1987. He infuriated liberals during the Thomas confirmation hearings with prosecutorial questioning of Anita Hill, a law professor who had accused Thomas of sexual harassment. At one point, Specter accused her of “flat-out perjury.”

Specter annoyed fellow Republicans by voting “not proven” on impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton in 1999, helping prevent the Democrat from being ousted from office over his affair with a White House intern.

Specter unsuccessfully sought the 1996 Republican presidential nomination. He had several health scares, undergoing open-heart surgery and surgery for a brain tumor, as well as chemotherapy for two bouts of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In February 2009, a month after Democratic President Barack Obama took office, he became one of three Republican senators to vote for Obama’s economic stimulus bill that Specter said was needed to avert a depression like that of the 1930s.

Specter was reviled by some conservatives for giving Obama an important early political victory. In April 2009, Specter at age 79 abandoned the Republicans – saying his party had moved too far to the right – and was welcomed by Obama and Vice President Joe Biden as a Democrat.

Incumbent senators rarely face stiff challenges for their party’s nomination for re-election, but Specter barely survived conservative Pat Toomey’s challenge in 2004. Pennsylvania Republican primary voters are more conservative than the state’s overall electorate, and Specter calculated that he could not win the Republican primary in 2010.

‘DECIDED BY THAT JURY’

“I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate – not prepared to have that record decided by that jury,” Specter said in April 2009 in explaining his defection.

In the 2010 Democratic primary, Specter had the support of the Democratic establishment, including Obama, Pennsylvania’s governor and labor unions. But liberal challenger Joe Sestak, a retired Navy admiral and two-term congressman, painted Specter as a political contortionist concerned only about himself.

A Sestak TV ad featured a clip of Specter telling a news interviewer: “My change in party will enable me to be re-elected.” Sestak thumped Specter in a May 2010 primary.

“He has been a serious and consequential senator for three decades, yet mostly ungenerous words come to mind: driven, tenacious, arrogant, self-righteous, opportunistic,” Congress expert Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution think tank told the New York Times after Specter’s defeat.

Specter was born in Kansas in 1930 during the Great Depression. His father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who owned a junkyard. Specter moved to Philadelphia at age 17 to attend the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1951, then served in the Air Force before attending Yale Law School.

He was a Democrat until age 35, when the Republicans offered their nomination for district attorney of Philadelphia. He served as the city’s district attorney from 1966 to 1974.

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Projo.com

As the gay-rights debate intensified nationwide, Pat Baker emerged as a face of the strife on the local front.

Struggling with terminal lung cancer, Baker spent sleepless nights urging lawmakers to repeal a law that forbids the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages.

Twice, the longtime correctional officer at the Adult Correctional Institutions dragged herself, oxygen tank in tow, to the State House in March to testify for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

“I worked for those benefits,” Baker said then. “And when I say worked, I worked hard. You name it, it’s happened. I’ve found inmates hanging; I’ve found inmates dead from suicide. I’ve been traumatized mentally and physically, only to get to this point in my life when I’m terminally ill … and I find out my wife is being begrudged $1,861 a month.”

“This kind of bigotry has to be rectified,” Baker said in an interview at her home, vowing to fight until her last breath.

Baker, 55, died Sunday at Kent Hospital. She is survived by her wife of six years, Deborah Tevyaw, whom she married in Massachusetts; two brothers, Richard Baker and Frederick Divers; a sister, Deborah Baker; and her beloved dog, Hooch.

“She had the biggest heart in the world,” Tevyaw, who met Baker about nine years ago through mutual friends, said Monday. The two married in Provincetown on Aug. 4, 2005, and had planned to renew their vows there this month, but called off the plans as Baker was hospitalized.

“I’m so devastated and so heartbroken,” Tevyaw said, her voice breaking. “I lost my best friend, my partner, my confidant, and my wife, and she died without her wish.”

Tevyaw vowed to “fight for the dream that Pat worked so hard” for — her promise to her wife.

“I know it’s a long, hard road, but I don’t think anybody should tell anybody [else] who they should love,” Tevyaw said. “I don’t know what’s ahead of me, but I’m willing to fight it.”

Marriage Equality Rhode Island, a group that works for same-sex marriage, issued a statement mourning Baker’s death.

“Rhode Island has lost a great champion for civil rights, and we have all lost a dear friend,” said Martha Holt, Marriage Equality Rhode Island Board chairwoman. “Pat Baker personified courage and demonstrated remarkable strength in her lifetime. Her gentle, determined voice became synonymous with the equality movement, and she demonstrated to all that love truly does make a family.”

Visiting hours will be held Tuesday from 4 to 8 p.m. at Thomas & Walter Quinn Funeral Chapel, 2435 Warwick Ave. in Warwick. The funeral service will be held Wednesday at 10 a.m. Burial will follow at St. Ann Cemetery in Cranston.