03.21.08
Howard Dean’s Gay Headache
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean had to spend two days this month getting deposed in a nasty lawsuit that has roiled the DNC and the gay community. Why he authorized the firing of the DNC’s gay and lesbian outreach director, Donald Hitchcock.
Hitchcock filed his suit against the DNC last spring, a year after he was fired, alleging the DNC discriminated against him because he’s gay and retaliated against him because his life partner, well-known Democratic activist Paul Yandura, publicly criticized the Democratic Party for not doing more to fight anti-gay ballot initiatives. Hitchcock is asking for unspecified damages and severance pay.
The lawsuit and Dean’s deposition, a copy of which was obtained by the Sleuth, has dredged up long simmering tensions between the DNC and gay Democrats.
Dean sparked the ire of the gay community when he said in an interview in May of 2006 on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “700 Club” hosted by evangelist Pat Robertson that the Democratic Party platform from 2004 states “marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Later, in hopes of quelling the firestorm, Dean apologized, saying he “misstated the Democratic Party’s platform, which does not say that marriage should be limited to a man and a woman, but says the party is committed to full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and leaves the issue to the states to decide.”
Dean also irked plenty of prominent gays when he eliminated the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) outreach desk at the DNC. The decision prompted longtime Democratic Party activist Jeff Soref, heir to the Masterlock fortune, to resign as chairman of the DNC’s gay caucus.
During his deposition this month, Dean defended his ties to the gay community, saying the DNC, under his stewardship, reached out to the gay community ” in many ways” and that the committee had “more senior staff with decision-making capability who were gay and lesbian than there had been previously.”
Matt Foreman, executive director of the Gay & Lesbian Task Force, was so outraged by Dean’s “700 Club” mistake that, at the time, he sent back a $5,000 donation his organization had received from the DNC. Foreman says the Hitchcock lawsuit is just one of many problems the DNC has with the gay community.