An openly gay Howard Dean for America staffer who attended an event for Congressman Dick Gephardt in Iowa alleges he was pushed and grabbed by Gephardt staffers, one of whom derided him as a ‘faggot.’ Dean for America campaign manager Joe Trippi wrote a letter to Gephardt for President campaign manager Steve Murphy, calling upon him to find the staffer responsible for this egregious behavior and fire him. Gephardt’s spokesman denied that anyone from the candidate’s staff used that word, reported the Des Moines Register. Chrissy Gephardt, the openly lesbian daughter of the candidate, is actively campaign for her dad’s presidential campaign. ‘I know that my father, just based on what he stands for and his stand on equal rights, he would not tolerate anything like this,’ said Chrissy Gephardt, according to the Register. ‘If something like that were to have happened, that person would be fired. There’s a zero-tolerance policy on the Gephardt campaign for stuff like that.’
The Senate Judiciary Committee last week considered the nomination of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Claude Allen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Allen’s hostility towards the GLBT community is well documented, say activists. In 1984, during Sen. Jesse Helms’ campaign against North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, Allen, as Helm’s campaign aide, was quoted by a local reporter as stating that Hunt was vulnerable because his campaign could be ‘linked with the queers.’ Allen then said: ‘We could expound on Jim Hunt’s connections with the homosexuals, the labor union connection, the radical feminist connection, the socialist connection.’ Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked Allen, ‘Do you understand how some people in America might take your use of this word ‘queers’ as being negative, to denigrate them, and not respectful?’ Allen asserted that he did not mean to denigrate homosexuals, but that he had been referring to the ‘strange, abnormal, out-of-the-ordinary individuals and groups’ working on Hunt’s campaign. Allen is currently deputy secretary in the Health and Human Services Department, where he has been accused by AIDS activists and others of pressing a conservative bias towards HIV/AIDS issues and of conducting a ‘witch-hunt’ against AIDS advocacy groups.