Howard Dean Screws Gay Outreach Coordinator, Advocate at DNC

Via Drudge:

Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean on May 2 fired the party's gay outreach advisor Donald Hitchcock less than a week after Hitchcock's domestic partner, Paul Yandura, a longtime party activist, accused Dean of failing to take stronger action to defend gays.

Dean immediately hired gay former Democratic Party operative Brian Bond to replace Hitchcock, according to DNC spokesperson Karen Finney, who called Bond a "proven leader."

Bond served from 1996 to 2003 as executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a bipartisan national group that raises money and provides training to help elect openly gay candidates to public office.
"It was not retaliation," Finney said of Hitchcock's dismissal. "It was decided we needed a change. We decided to hire a proven leader."

Hitchcock declined comment Tuesday night except to confirm that Dean informed him May 2 through a surrogate that he had been terminated. He said he was considering consulting an attorney to decide whether to contest the firing.

Regardless of how you feel about gay couples, this stinks to high heaven for the DNC. If a female activist had made charges that Dean wasn't doing enough for rape victims and Dean fired her husband, who was in charge of a related outreach effort, it would almost certainly and immediate be condemned as a retaliatory act that was certainly tasteless, unethical, and depending on the jurisdiction, may be legally actionable as well.

The Democratic Party claims to have big tent, but Howard Dean seems to take a dim view of the rights of those who enter through the back door.

We can only hope that if they do decide to follow with legal action for this apparently retaliatory firing by Screamin' Howard, that Hitchcock and Yandura get justice in the end.