NJ election 2018: Menendez attacks Hugin for past stances on women, gays at Princeton

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., on Friday continued his attacks on Republican challenger Bob Hugin, using Princeton University as a backdrop to highlight Hugin’s past opposition to greater protections for gay students and admitting women into an exclusive club there.

As a 21-year-old student a Princeton in the 1970s, Hugin, now 64, lobbied against efforts to expand the university’s nondiscrimination policy to cover sexual orientation. Later, as president of the alumni board of a selective all-male eating club in the early 1990s, Hugin fought a woman’s 13-year attempt in state and federal court to make the club co-ed.

Hugin has since reversed course on those positions, describing the decision to admit women into the club as “without question the right thing to do.” But Menendez on Friday characterized Hugin’s actions as part of a “lifelong record of working to keep women down, to shut the LGBTQ Americans out,” making him the wrong man to represent New Jersey in the Senate.

“There are those of us who can look back at our careers with pride knowing that we stood on the right side of history when it comes to women’s rights and civil rights,” Menendez said, standing among supporters in front of a bronze statue of a tiger in Palmer Square. “And then there are those people like Bob Hugin who stood on the wrong side of history time and time again.”

As he did in July when his history at Princeton first became a campaign issue, Hugin on Friday said his views have evolved over the years and accused Menendez of “trying to paint me as something I’m not.”

“I'm proud that my views have evolved over the four decades and I view that as a positive,” Hugin said in a statement. “It's unfortunate that someone who has spent 25 years in Washington has nothing positive to campaign on and instead has to resort to political attacks like these. As senator, I will put people above party and politics to get results for the people of New Jersey. Another six years of failure is not an option.”

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Menendez, for his part, voted for the Defense of Marriage Act as a member of the House in 1996, helping to pass a law that denied federal benefits for same-sex couples. He announced his support for repealing the law in 2011. 

Menendez on Friday touted his work as a state lawmaker crafting New Jersey’s first bias crimes law, which included sexual orientation. Among those who spoke in support of the senator were Marsha Shapiro and Louise Walpin, who were the lead plaintiffs in the legal battle to permit same-sex couples to marry in New Jersey.

Negative campaign continues

Friday’s back-and-forth between Menendez and Hugin is in keeping with how negative the campaign between the two men has become, with each candidate and their affiliated groups spending millions of dollars on attacks ads. 

Even supporters for each candidate got in on the action Friday when about a dozen pro-Hugin protesters interrupted the news conference with chants of “Menendez is corrupt,” eliciting a response from those gathered around Menendez of “Six more years!”

Menendez, 64, has sought to tie Hugin to President Donald Trump and portray Hugin, a Marine Corps veteran and the former CEO of Celgene, as a greedy pharmaceutical executive who got rich raising the price of drugs needed by cancer patients to stay alive. 

Hugin, meanwhile, has made sure voters are well-aware of Menendez's recent trial on corruption charges, which ended in a partial acquittal by the judge, the government dropping the rest of the case, and then a letter of admonishment by the Senate's ethics committee.

'Politically correct fascism'

Now, as the race enters its final weeks, the Menendez campaign doesn’t want voters to forget about Hugin’s stances as a younger man that were antagonistic toward women and gay people at Princeton.

That line of attack could resonate with voters in a midterm election widely viewed as a referendum on President Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women and boasted of groping women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

Hugin was president of an elite Princeton eating club during his senior year at the university, in 1976, amid a rancorous debate on campus over including “sexual or affectional preference” in the university’s official nondiscrimination policy.

Following acts of vandalism against student members of the school’s Gay Alliance, the student government passed a resolution supporting the change, according to an article that appeared that year in the Central Jersey Home News. 

The Tiger Inn, the selective all-male eating club Hugin led, responded by circulating a petition requesting that the student body rescind its action and calling for a student referendum to decide the matter.

“We feel students as a whole should have a say on something as controversial as this,” Hugin, then 21, told the Central Jersey Home News.

If a member of the Tiger Inn was found to be gay, Hugin added, “he wouldn’t last long.”

Well after graduating, Hugin then spearheaded the Tiger Inn’s legal effort defend its membership policies, which excluded women even as other eating clubs on campus moved to admit them. (Eating clubs, distinct to Princeton, date to 1879 and have long served as exclusive hangouts for dining and social life, akin to fraternities.)

As a leader on the Tiger Inn’s alumni board in the early 1990s, when he was in his late 30s, Hugin fought a woman’s 13-year attempt in state and federal court to make the club co-ed.

After the case settled in 1992, Hugin accused Sally Frank, the woman behind the lawsuit, of “politically correct fascism” in a Philadelphia Inquirer article. 

That settlement was reached only after the New Jersey department of Law and Public Safety’s Civil Rights Division ordered the Princeton eating clubs to admit women, a decision upheld by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1990.

Even after the Tiger Inn admitted women for the first time in 1991, becoming that last of the Princeton eating clubs to do so, the Tiger Inn under Hugin filed its own federal lawsuit to preserve, as Hugin told the New York Times, “the right to determine our own membership.”

Hugin in July expressed regret for his role in those events, stressing how his views have changed over the past 25 years.

“The Tiger Inn becoming co-ed was a very positive development for the organization and has strengthened it on every level,” he said. “The decision, made by the undergraduate members, to admit women back in the early `90s was without question the right thing to do. Personally, I wish I had taken a leadership role in making it happen sooner.

"Personal growth should be seen as a strength, not a weakness," he added. "Forty years ago, discussion about gay marriage was nearly non-existent and women being the breadwinners in their homes was a rarity. Today, thankfully, both of those things have changed, and America is a better place for it."

Public polls show Menendez with a lead over Hugin, but the Democrat’s cushion has shrunk in recent months. 

A Quinnipiac University poll released last month showed Menendez with a six-point advantage, well below the 17-point lead the poll found he held in March.

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com