Lawsuit exposes rift between gays and blacks at the DNC

Austin American-Statesman | Window on Washington

Not surprisingly, gays and lesbians have favored the Democratic Party in recent elections. The Democratic platform, after all, commits the party to full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of the country. The Republican platform, on the other hand, proposes limiting marriage to a man and a woman.

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...