Edwards’ and Privitere’s original engagement photo. (Photo by Kristina Hill courtesy of Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere)

Even by Rocky Mountain standards, Colorado’s eighth state senate district is one of the most geologically diverse tracts of land imaginable. The bulk of its population is huddled around skiing communities like Breckenridge or Steamboat Springs, but the desolate highways that traverse Colorado’s northwestern corner wind through steep canyons, jagged hills, desert plateaus, lush deciduous forests and grassy riverbeds.

It was also the site of one of the nastiest primary campaigns in this year’s election cycle.

On June 4, with just over three weeks to go until the election, Republican voters in the eighth district received a piece of direct mail assailing their incumbent state senator, Jean White.

The mailers depicted a sepia-washed photograph of two men kissing against a backdrop of snowcapped evergreens. Splashed across a blood-red banner was the caption: “Senator Jean White’s Idea of ‘Family Values’?”

In an election system that permits outside groups to participate in any race at any level in any part of the country, these postcards were the work of Public Advocate of the United States, an organization based in Falls Church, Va. that emits a constant stream of far-right messaging.

White took office in January 2011 after her husband, Al, was tapped by Gov. John Hickenlooper to run Colorado’s tourism bureau. This year, she found herself running to hold on to the seat in a race that was one of only six contested senate primaries in the entire state. Her opponent was Randy Baumgardner, a state representative and rancher from the Western Slope.

A quick glance of White’s voting record confirms her conservative credentials. In her brief time in the Colorado Senate, she has voted to lower taxes, rebut aspects of the federal Affordable Care Act, and to protect the rights of healthcare workers to make religious objections to providing birth control. But two votes landed her on Public Advocate’s target list.

In March 2011 and again in April 2012, the Colorado Senate approved bills legalizing same-sex civil unions. With Democrats outnumbering Republicans 20 to 15, the civil-union bills did not need any minority support to pass. Yet both times, White was one of only three Republicans to vote for the measures.

“I just believe in equality for everyone,” she says in a phone interview. “I’m a Republican. I believe in individual freedom and personal responsibility and keeping government out of our lives.”

But of the issues that Public Advocate focuses on, none are more prominent—or combatively opposed—than same-sex marriage. Since the mid-2000s, when states first started granting marriage equality to homosexual couples, Public Advocate has been in overdrive, producing a steady flow of press releases that bemoan the erosion of “traditional values” and decry a “homosexual agenda.”

Third-party groups that dig at wedge issues are nothing new, though, and legally beyond the control of the candidates whose opponents take the brunt of their attacks. In the eighth district GOP primary, Baumgardner was also the target of third-party mailers, including one that accused him of voting against a “plan to protect northwest Colorado families from dangerous sex offenders.” Baumgardner told the The Denver Post in June that the literature was false and that he had supported the bill in question.

That White was targeted by a third-party group that opposes her position on civil unions is hardly alarming, though. It was the image Public Advocate’s flier used that now has the group on the receiving end of a cease-and-desist letter from a leading civil rights organization as well as facing a potential lawsuit.

The photograph of the two men kissing was not some stock image plucked from a database. It was a Photoshop job on an engagement photo of a New Jersey couple that Public Advocate happened to find on the Internet and appropriate for its own agenda.

***

Not long after The Denver Post reported on the nasty campaign unfolding in the eighth district, Brian Edwards, a university administrator from Montclair, N.J., received an email from a college friend with a link to an article containing an image of Public Advocate’s mailer.

“She included the message, ‘Is this you?’ ” Edwards says. He opened the link and saw the image of him leaning in to kiss his then-fiancé, Tom Privitere, a ticket broker. But instead of the graceful black-and-white shot of the couple standing across the water from Lower Manhattan, Edwards, 32, saw the discolored version with the altered backdrop and the banner copy.

Edwards proceeded to search the Web for more information on this shocking discovery and found The Denver Post’s article. He called the story’s author, Lynn Bartels, and asked why his and Privitere’s engagement photo was being used for political bombardment 2,000 miles away. Bartels explained that the mailers were being used against White and another Republican state senator who had voted for civil unions (Jeffrey Hare, who represents exurbs of Denver), and that they had come from Public Advocate.

“You only feel shock,” Privitere, 37, says. “Someone can take an image you hold so closely and use it for the exact opposite reason it was taken.”

Edwards and Privitere, fighting through “anger, sadness and heartbreak,” as Privitere described their range of emotions, quickly discovered that in March the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed Public Advocate of the United States as a hate group. They contacted the SPLC, along with gay-rights organizations like Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal.

On July 11, the SPLC issued a cease-and-desist letter to Public Advocate on behalf of Edwards and Privitere, as well as Kristina Hill, the photographer who took the original picture. Public Advocate and its president, Eugene Delgaudio, have until today to file their response.

“I’ve never seen a situation like this,” says Christine P. Sun, SPLC’s deputy legal director and the letter’s author. “I think that’s why it was so shocking to everyone. Tom and Brian are not public figures.”

Far from it, in fact. Edwards and Privitere met in 2000 when both were working at the Jekyll and Hyde Pub, a Greenwich Village bar drawing its motif from the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. They got engaged in December 2009. The following May, they went out to Brooklyn Bridge Park to have Hill do the photo shoot. Standing a few yards from the edge of the East River, with the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline filling the backdrop, Edwards and Privitere clutched hands and kissed while Hill captured the moment.

They had their civil ceremony on September 7, 2010 in New Haven, Conn., followed by a wedding in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Edwards and Privitere blogged the whole thing. After tying the knot, their website, The Gay Wedding Experience, became a running narrative of their lives as a married couple—going to other couples’ nuptials, witnessing New York State’s legalization of same-sex marriage, marking their first anniversary, sending out Christmas cards. They opened their lives together to the public, but that hardly makes them public figures.

“We never saw it coming when we put our engagement photo on our wedding blog,” Edwards says. “No one could imagine their photos could be used for evil.”

Delgaudio, however, is very much in the spotlight in Northern Virginia, and not just for his agitprop. His more public gig is as a member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, a position that has given him a microphone for his views on homosexuality and other topics. He is also a steadfast opponent of public transit, most recently leading the opposition against Loudoun County’s participation in the second phase of Metrorail’s new Silver Line. (The Board of Supervisors, after much deliberation, finally opted into the project in early July.)

There are plenty of organizations that while not embracing of same-sex-marriage rights, still fall well short of the SPLC’s definition of a hate group. But Public Advocate, Sun says, is well over the line.

“Simply anti-gay views aren’t enough to qualify as a hate group,” she says. “It’s when anti-gay groups spread lies.”

Delgaudio (Via Friends of Delgaudio)

In the past, Delgaudio has invoked everything from airport security screenings to the Pirates of the Caribbean film series as elements of a “radical homosexual agenda.”

“His actions are outrageous whether or not he’s an elected official,” Sun says.

Despite several emails and phone calls asking for comment, Delgaudio offered DCist a very brief statement about Public Advocate’s use of Edwards’ and Privitere’s photo, writing in an email that “I am looking into this matter.”

But in an email last month to Bartels, the Denver Post reporter, Delgaudio danced around the question of copyright infringement:

“We are a non-profit and make no money from any photos, postings, references, parodies, street theater or educational materials. Other groups make fair use of our materials or 2000 photos from our website under these broad principles of political education and we acknowledge a limited use of many of our own materials, by other groups, under parody, some fairly strong critical attacks from our political opposition on our efforts as part of a robust debate.”

Public Advocate is chartered as a non-profit 501(c)(4), contributions to which are not tax deductible. In 2010, it took in just over $1 million in donations and grants. Most of its expenditures go toward its direct-mail and online advocacy operations. Delgaudio’s compensation as the organization’s president was $158,682, paid not as salary, but as a consultation fee, according to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service. He earns another $41,200 for serving on the Board of Supervisors.

Since discovering their photo was repurposed for Delgaudio’s agenda, Edwards and Privitere have tried to tell their story as much as possible. They’ve been featured by ABC News and MSNBC, and their case against Delgaudio has circulated throughout the mainstream and LGBT press.

But being thrust into public view hasn’t been kind. “We’re contantly stressed,” Edwards says. “We can’t help but to see the nasty comments that have been written on the articles.”

Still, for every nasty jab, the pair says there are 100 positive responses.

“The outpouring of love that has come our way is beyond anything that I can put words to,” Privitere says. “Complete strangers emailing us out of the blue with words of support and kindness. It does make us get up in the morning and it keeps us fighting.”

Regardless of Delgaudio’s response to the SPLC letter, Sun says further legal action is a distinct possibility, both for Hill’s copyright claim for the misuse of her work, and the damage inflicted on Edwards and Privitere.

***

Colorado State Sen. Jean White (via Flickr)

Back in Colorado, Randy Baumgardner won the eighth state senate district’s Republican primary with 58 percent of the vote to Jean White’s 42 percent. He’ll face off against Democrat Emily Tracy in the fall. White will leave office next January, and she pins her impending departure on Public Advocate’s mail campaign.

“I definitely think that was solely responsible for my defeat,” she says. “It was the cornerstone of my opposition.”

Baumgardner’s campaign emphasized his intense support for individual rights and issues sensitive to western Colorado’s ranching community. But the primary was vicious, and White had expected her votes for civil unions to be used against her. In interviews and on the trail, Baumgardner contrasted his opposition to civil unions to White’s votes.

In 2006, Colorado voters approved an amendment to the state’s constitution banning same-sex marriage. Today, the state is one of 31 that officially define marriage as the union between one man and one woman. White voted for the amendment, but says civil unions are “completely different” and something she supports without hesitation.

“It’s just something that I believe strongly in,” she says. “It was a principled vote and I would do it again.”

But what cuts deeply for White is that the opposition to her backing of civil unions dragged into the fray a private couple on the other side of the continent.

“That was a very special picture to them and to have it be used in an attack ad is unconscionable,” she says about Edwards and Privitere. “I fully support them in going forward and I would stand behind them 100 percent.”

Delgaudio’s organization attacked White while invoking “family values.” In June, she told The Denver Post that she has a gay niece and a gay nephew, and that most voters did not take offense to her support for civil unions.

“I think the district as a whole is a very diverse district,” she tells DCist.

If anyone’s family values were offended, it was Privitere’s and Edwards’. Though they never expected they would be dragooned into being advocates themselves, it’s a role they’re not shying away from. “Speaking up is our moral obligation,” Edwards says.

Privitere puts their case into phrasing that might seem familiar to Delgaudio: “We consider ourselves a family as much as anyone else, and it’s our values that have been attacked.”