A story that’s not getting a lot of attention, but might blow up in a big way before the election, is that the DNC is getting sued for firing a gay staffer. The Austin American-Statesman has gotten their hands on Dean’s deposition and it’s great watching Dean kind of squirm on the witness stand, at one time telling his lawyer ”I’m used to much worse from Tim Russert.” (The deposition was from March of this year.) An excerpt from the article:
But an increasingly nasty lawsuit against the DNC, brought by Donald Hitchcock after he was fired as the party’s gay and lesbian outreach director, has exposed the rift between gays and one of the party’s most important constituencies, African Americans.
DNC Chairman Howard Dean describes the rift in his deposition in the lawsuit, a portion of which was just recently posted on YouTube and is causing more than a little political heartburn as the party prepares to nominate Barack Obama as its first African American for president.
In the video, Dean describes how he has tried to be a peacemaker between gays and lesbians and prominent African American leaders, led by onetime Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile, who had objected to goals and timetables for gay and lesbian delegates to the party’s national convention.
“I wanted equal representation for gay and lesbian Americans, and I wanted to achieve it in a way that wasn’t offensive to the history of the civil rights movement,” Dean says in the deposition, which was videotaped in March but only made public a week ago.
And as a further update, the DNC lawyer just got caught fudging the next trial date in an attempt to move the trial to after the election as well as verbally going after the fired staffer’s lawyer and telling her to “know her place.”