Be Careful Who You're Calling Dear

When the Brooklyn Democratic machine and the often-gay friendly borough president Marty Markowitz got behind the candidacy of Noach Dear -- a harsh foe of gay rights in his years on the City Council who was handed a post on the City Taxi and Limousine Commission by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani just as the pair were leaving office due to term limits -- critics sprang into action.

Tom Robbins in the Village Voice took a look at Dear's history of corruption, his collusion with the former apartheid government of South Africa, and his use of his influence on the Taxi and Limo Commish to raise $$$ for his judicial run (thank you, Mr. Giuliani).

Allen Roskoff, president of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, an LGBT group, did a nutrition content send-up of Dear's career, at the same time ripping into Markowitz for his two-faced embrace of the homophobic judicial hopeful, and Brooklyn's Lambda Independent Dems, also a gay club, ripped into Dear as well.

And then WCBS' Andrew Kirtzman, one of the fraternity of out gay reporters in town, tried to talk to Dear, only to find the candidate backing his car down a one-way street to avoid having to meet the press. Kirtzman's report focused largely on Dear's failure as well to appear before the judicial screening committees of the New York and the Brooklyn Bar Associations.

Finally, in a September 14 story in the newspaper City Hall, John DeSio writes that Democrats in Brooklyn support Dear in this race to keep him from an expected primary contest between State Senator Kevin Parker, an African American who will likely be challenged next year by City Councilman Kendall Stewart, who is also black. The thinking, at least in the analysis of Rock Hackshaw, a blogger at Room Eight, on whose reporting DeSio relies in part, is that Dear could enter the race and win if the African-American vote is split.

The most remarkable revelation from DeSio's story, however, is a comment from Matt Carlin, president of the gay Stonewall Independent Democrats, who seems willing to give Markowitz a pass for the most part: "Markowitz has a great record on LGBT issues. This is definitely a smudge on that record, but it's still a great record."

Question for Markowitz: How do you justify co-signing Dear's homophobia -- especially for a civil court seat -- when you have spent so much time in years past courting gay voters? Do you think it's okay to have a different set of principles depending on the community you are addressing? Would you possibly even think of pulling a stunt like this with a candidate with a racist or anti-Semitic history?