Roy Ashburn: Out and about

Published June 12, 2010 at 7:00 a.m.
The state senator discusses California politics, his anti-gay legislative record before being outed and more...

...Roy Ashburn was smitten by politics as a kid on the Central Coast. At 12, he was pedaling his bike to Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial campaign headquarters in San Luis Obispo, hanging out and helping out. He would grow up to be a Kern County supervisor for a dozen years, then an Assembly member and a state senator for another 14 years, representing some of the most conservative turf in California and casting some of the most conservative votes in the Legislature. Ashburn will be termed out come December, but his life as a "family values" politician all but ended months ago, in the early morning hours of March 3. He was arrested for DUI after he'd left a gay club, and soon thereafter acknowledged that he was gay. His DUI cost him his driver's license for a time and put him back on a bike, pedaling his life in an altogether new direction.

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