Staffing Controversies
On April 6, 2005, Martínez accepted the resignation of his legal counsel, Brian Darling, who was responsible for writing and circulating the Schiavo memo related to the Terry Schiavo case.
Martínez immediately denied all knowledge of Darling's involvement in the situation, noting that he himself had inadvertently passed a copy of the memo to Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, believing that it was nothing more than an outline of the Republican proposal. Martínez asserted that the memo "was intended to be a working draft," stating that Darling "doesn't really know how I got it."
The Schiavo memo is the third incident in which Martínez accepted broad responsibility while laying blame upon a staffer for the underlying deed. During the Republican primary, a staffer was blamed for a passage in a campaign flyer painting his opponent Bill McCollum as a servant of the "radical homosexual lobby". Shortly thereafter another staffer was blamed for labeling federal agents involved in the Elián González affair as "armed thugs".
In spite of Martínez's vocal objections to homosexual issues such as gay marriage, he employed two gay men in his 2004 Senate campaign.
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