Six GLAAD board members step down over AT&T flap, but not former AT&T employee Coronado

Oddly, the one board member who needs to resign pronto is Troup Coronado, the direct connection to AT&T and the form letter that GLAAD sent to the FCC in opposition to Net Neutrality. (Politico ):

Some board members were said to have resigned because of concerns that GLAAD failed to adhere to its conflict of interest standards and to protest GLAAD's failure to protect its president, Jarrett Barrios, who submitted his letter of resignation to the group Saturday amid a growing backlash in the gay blogosphere over the group's AT&T stance.

...The six GLAAD board members a source said resigned are: [Gary] Bitner; [Randi] Weingarten; Jocelyn Bramble, an associate at the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf; Kelly Dermody, a partner at Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco; Humberto Mata, founder of nonprofit Fundaci?n VIHDA in Ecuador; and James Walker, a commercial real estate executive.

...The six former board members submitted a joint statement to POLITICO that said they resigned from the organization's board for "various reasons," but declined to comment on those reasons because they say "there's been too much unfair and false information spread about GLAAD" recently.

I guess these board members didn't want to clear the air with factual information, even on background. Mike Signorile :

Most of the six are Barrios loyalists whom he'd installed, including Gary Bitner, p.r. guy whom the board insisted come on my show with Barrios (a request I refused). Not on the list, however, is Troup Coronado, the Republican former Orrin Hatch staffer and AT&T executive on the board who pushed for the backing of the merger and the net neutrality letter (and has helped put antigay judges on the bench.) The board now must act to remove him. And he must step down from the boards of other groups, including Equality California, or be removed.

More about Coronado:

Coronado, a former employee and registered lobbyist for AT&T, is said to have approached several gay rights organizations seeking support for the AT&T/T-Mobile deal. In May, he approached the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce to ask representatives of those groups to sign a letter that voiced support for AT&T's bid, leaders of those organizations told POLITICO.

Even more unseemly news about Coronado from the Washington Blade:

Coronado -  who once worked for Orin Hatch - is turning out to be a controversial background player in the world of LGBT philanthropy. As reported last week in the Blade, both OpenSecrets.org and the Washington Post have questioned Coronado's conduct in one way or another over the years.

After an investigation into Coronado's past, the Blade has discovered that a Troup Coronado who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin the same year as AT&T's Coronado, and whom an anonymous source confirmed is the same person, appeared in several CSPAN videos from 1991-1993 as a representative of the anti-gay conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation. Jeremy Hooper of the GoodAsYou blog was able to identify several instances of media outlets covering the Heritage Foundation opposition to pro-LGBT legislation in the 1980s and 1990s, and Heritage has been vocal in opposing same-sex marriage over the past decade. The CSPAN video gives Coronado's title at the organization as Director of the New Majority Project.

The Heritage Foundation declined to comment about the purpose of this now-defunct program, but according to a July 14, 1991 Newsweek article by Charles Lane, titled "Defying the stereotypes," the project is defined as the body's "minority outreach program."