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October 10, 2007
Meanwhile back at the DNC…
Posted by: Chris
While Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi are herding cats on whether to include "gender identity" in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Democratic National Committee has agreed to court-ordered mediation in the plain-old garden variety anti-gay discrimination suit filed by Donald Hitchcock, the party's former gay liaison.
The lawsuit brought by Hitchcock (which you can read in full in the jump to this post) is fairly straightforward stuff. He had received uniformly positive work reviews until his partner, longtime Democratic consultant and fundraiser Paul Yandura, began publicly criticizing Howard Dean and the DNC for failing to use party resources to fight dozens of state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. (That's Hitchcock pictured on the left and Yandura on the right during happier times, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.)
Rather than treat Hitchcock and his partner as two separate individuals, as the Democrats do generally with couples and certainly have with power-heteros James Carville and Mary Matalin, Dean and the Dems are alleged to have told Hitchcock that things would go very poorly for him if Yandura didn't clam up.
If the allegations are true, then it is beyond despicable for a party that claims to value gay Americans to leverage a relationship like that for political advantage -- much less to silence a party critic. Then again, Howard Dean has a long history of bristling at us impetulant gays who dare question the pace of progress or the secret strategies of The Governor Who Gave You Civil Unions. (The real story behind Dean's passive role in that historic Vermont achievement has rarely been told.)
Retaliation of the type that Hitchcock alleges seems par for the course for the petty pol Howard Dean turned out to be, having crushed so many high hopes from the heady early days of his 2004 presidential run. As much as I support the ENDA compromise engineered by Barney, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership, it all rings a bit hollow when you peek behind the wizard's curtain and see the sausage factory behind. (Talk about your mixed metaphors.)
For a complete news summary of the Hitchcock suit, click or bookmark: gaynewswatch.com/demssuedbygayliaison
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North Dallas Thirty on Oct 11, 2007 2:01:23 PM:
The thing here, Chris, is that James Carville has demonstrated that he WOULD tell Howard Dean and the Democrat Party to go to hell, and it would cost them in the process.
But a gay person? Please. They can endorse the FMA, as Harold Ford did, and HRC leadership, with support from Andrew Tobias, will explain why it's a good thing. They can put up a Presidential candidate that brags he shares the "same position" as another that Stonewall, HRC, and NGLTF call vicious, evil, and homophobic, and they'll pump tens of millions of dollars of support to him.
Democrats know they have gays' undying votes and support regardless of what they do; therefore, they go ahead and do whatever they like.
And frankly, I can't blame Republicans for not bothering with gays when it's so obvious that gays fully endorse and support the same behaviors in Democrats that they shriek are "homophobic" in Republicans. There is no point wasting money on people who oppose you and support your opponent no matter what you or they do.