CIVIL RIGHTS
-Use City Contracting Power for Civil Rights Issues?
-Gay Marriage?
For decades, the city government has its enormous financial power to move social agendas. In the 1980s, the city used its pensions to force corporations to divest from South Africa to protest Apartheid.
This year, the City Council passed an Equal Benefits Law, which requires contractors that offer benefits to spouses of their employees to extend the same package to domestic partners of workers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed the measure.
Gay marriage has also become a key civil rights issue in the campaign. While marriage is legally a state issue, in February, a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice ruled that the city should not discriminate against same-sex couples. She ordered the city clerk to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Mayor Michael Bloomberg appealed the ruling.
Fernando Ferrer supports the use of city contracts to advance social agendas. “Whether it’s… the extension of domestic partnership rights to those you do business with the city, or the rights of the transgendered - for me it fits into the same category,” Ferrer said at a forum earlier this year. “You cannot believe in some human rights and not all.”
Ferrer said he also supports gay marriage.
C. Virginia Fields supports the use of city contracts to advance social agendas.
“I am for marriage equality,” Fields said at a recent forum. “I am for the Dignity for All Students Act. I am for adoption rights for LGBT parents as well as the repeal of “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” because it doesn’t work. I am for the protection of transgendered people.”
As Speaker of the City Council, Miller helped draft and passed an Equal Benefits Law, which requires contractors that offer benefits to spouses of their employees to extend the same package to domestic partners of workers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed the bill.
Miller also supports gay marriage and, if elected, promises to issue marriage licenses.
“I have been for gay marriage since I ran for office for the first time in January of 1996,” Miller said. “The right choice is to issue those marriage licenses, to stand up and say, â€The equal protection laws of the State of New York applies to LGBT New Yorkers,’ and I, as mayor - if you choose me, if I’m so fortunate to be elected - will issue those marriage licenses immediately, because it’s the right thing to do.”
Anthony Weiner supports the use of city contracts to advance social agendas.
Weiner also supports gay marriage. “I have a history of fighting for civil rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered New Yorkers,” Weiner said at a forum. “When I was running for Congress in 1998, long before the issue of gay marriage was particularly hot, and at that time civil unions was the big issue being contested, I endorsed gay marriage.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has supported using the city’s contracting power to advance social agendas in certain cases, but he vetoed the City Council's Equal Benefits Law, which requires contractors that offer benefits to the spouses of their employees to extend the same package to the domestic partners of workers.
Bloomberg says that he while personally supports gay marriage, it is a state issue.
Last year, Bloomberg appealed the Manhattan Supreme Court ruling to begin issuing marriage licenses. He told the New York Times in February, “I do not want to see happen here what happened in California,” where gay marriages were authorized by Mayor Gavin Newsom and overturned by the state court.
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Maria Samba, a 49 year-old immigrant from Ecuador, makes a living by selling flavored ices in the summer and hot dogs in the winter. Like many other undocumented immigrants, Samba couldn’t apply for street vending licenses and often has to pay fines for illegal vending.
So when she heard that the city has passed a law allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for street vending licenses, she wanted to be involved.
That is why she was in City Hall last month holding one of the pens that Mayor Michael Bloomberg used to sign into law a legislation that would prohibit the Department of Consumer Affairs from questioning applicants for street vending licenses about their immigration status.
“I won what I wanted,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter, joining many other vendors at the step of City Hall. “I won my dream.”
“We’re all very happy,” Flor Bermudez, staff attorney for Esperanza del Barrio, a group that works with Mexican and Latino immigrants, told Daily News. “The city will no longer discriminate against immigrants in the licensing process.”
In the past, the Department of Consumer Affairs required that applicants had to have proper work authorization or permanent resident cards (green cards) in order to apply for licenses.
When Mayor Bloomberg issued Executive Order 41 in 2003 prohibiting city agencies from inquiring or disclosing immigration status of New Yorkers who come into contact with city government, street vending was the last permit that still used immigration status as a criterion for certification.
The new law will help bring the vending law inline with the executive order, Bloomberg said.
The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Charles Barron was passed in the city council in June with little but vocal opposition.
“It’s a continuation of the city moving in the wrong direction,” Republican Councilmember James Oddo told the New York Sun. “This is the Last permit that allowed the city to ask the immigration status. Instead of removing it, I think we should be asking the status when we hand out all of our permits.”
Some argued that allowing more people to apply for vending licenses would put small stores in jeopardy. “We have people selling fruit on the street in front of a fruit stand that cost less because they have lower overhead cost,” said Richard Lipsky from The Neighborhood Retail Alliance, an umbrella group advocating the rights of small businesses “That’s not acceptable”
However, there are a limited number of street vending licenses. “The general merchandise vending licenses have been kept at 853 ever since 1970s,” said Dena Improta, of the Department of Consumer Affairs. Two other types of licenses are for pushcart food vending permit, capped at 3,000, and seasonal food permit at 1,000.
Still small business are concerned about their future. “What happened here is that they used the over inflated sympathy for undocumented immigrants to help the campaign to increase the number of street vending licenses in the future,” said Lipsky.
Indeed, a bill to increase the number of licenses for street vending is about to get a hearing in the city council.
An immigrant from Bangkok, Thailand, Chaleampon Ritthichai is the editor of The Citizen.Â
When Nicholas “Fat Nick” Minucci, 19, a white man, fractured the skull of Glen Moore, 22, an African American, with a baseball bat while yelling racial epithets in Queens on June 29, it became an international news story and sparked scores of articles about how far we have or have not come in dealing with racism in our society. Anthony Ench, 21, has also been arrested in the attack.
The racial attack on Moore was only one of several bias crimes in New York over the past month, including an assault on an unidentified 22-year old Asian woman in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn on July 1 and an attack on Dwan Prince, a gay man in Brownsville, Brooklyn on June 8. But these other incidents did not occur in Howard Beach.
Howard Beach has been notorious since December, 1986, when a black man, Michael Griffith, whose car had broken down in the neighborhood, was set upon by a mob of white people from the neighborhood, and, fleeing, was hit and killed by a car on the highway. Howard Beach is a brand name when it comes to bias violence.
Three young white men were convicted of second degree manslaughter and first degree assault in the 1986 incident. But residents of the predominately white Howard Beach neighborhood were quick to say that racism had nothing to do with the attacks. Howard Beach residents said "they were unhappy with the convictions and many viewed the beatings as a simple scuffle--one in which race was not involved, and the severity of which did not warrant the punishment,” according to the Queens Tribune.
The 2005 Howard Beach incident has elicited a similar defensive tone among residents of the enclave. Since it was widely reported that Moore and the other black men he was with the night he was beaten were out to steal a car, according to police, white residents of the area do not want to see this crime attributed to their incurable hatred for black people.
"They got what they deserved," Tim Peterson told the New York Times. "And I'm not justifying it either."
There are similarities in official reaction as well. Mayor Ed Koch vociferously condemned the 1986 attacks. But by that time he was perceived as so racially divisive that he never recovered politically. A couple of more high-profile racial killings followed and Koch was rejected in favor of the city’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, in 1989.
Dinkins ran afoul of his handling of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, when an African American mob, inflamed by the killing of a 7-year old black child by a Hasidic driver running a light, attacked and killed Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, a rabbinical student visiting from Australia.
Mindful of the potential racial and political minefield, Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke out right after the June 29 attack, as soon as the police classified it as a hate crime. "I cannot stress it enough: we are going to live together, and nobody, nobody, should ever feel that they will be attacked because of their ethnicity, their orientation, their religion, where they live, their documented status, or anything else. Period. End of story,” he said.
Bloomberg has not, however, called a press conference to address the attack on Dwan Prince, but leaders of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project did call one to chastise the political establishment for not dealing with the case. “I reached out to every elected official at the state and local level in Brownsville,” Clarence Patton, director of the project, told me for a story in Gay City News “They acted as if they didn’t understand what I wanted them to do.”
One thing that has defused intergroup tensions in New York is the relatively quick response of the criminal justice system in 2005 versus 1986.
Nineteen years ago, African Americans had so little confidence in the Police Department and the Queens District Attorney’s office that Charles Hynes--now the Brooklyn District Attorney--was brought in as a special prosecutor to bring the Howard Beach suspects to justice.
Today, suspects are in custody in both the Howard Beach and Brownsville cases, a credit to more sensitive and effective police work and the willingness of witnesses in both neighborhoods to come forward.
While the Rev. Al Sharpton is back on the Howard Beach scene all these years later, there has been little call on the part of the political establishment for getting at the roots of the kind of bigotry that leads to these attacks.
The Department of Education has been in the process of increasing somewhat anti-bullying and intergroup relations programs in the schools, but Bloomberg is refusing to implement a school anti-bullying law passed by the City Council, calling it an “illegal” measure.
There seems to be a great desire--especially on the part of politicians--to treat bias incidents as aberrations and police matters, not reflective of some deep-seated problem among the good and unprejudiced people of New York. The gay community, however, has seen reports of anti-gay violence to the police go up 32 percent in the last year, an increase attributed by gay groups to the rise in gay visibility and the very public debate over issues like same-sex marriage.
Norman Siegel, the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union who is making a second run for public advocate, does not think combating hate crime is simple. He and civil rights activist Galen Kirkland spent years going to schools in Bensonhurt, Brooklyn to conduct classes designed to combat stereotyping. Siegel said if Mayor Bloomberg “wants to end hate crime, he should call a summit of civil rights groups” to address the problem--a route that the mayor is unlikely to go in an election year unless under extreme public pressure (as Mayor Giuliani was after the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999).
The press coverage of the Howard Beach incident is not likely to apply that pressure:
“ A Different New York,” said Bob Herbert of the New York Times.
“Howard Beach is not the same place,” wrote Ellis Hennican in Newsday.
“Thug-on-Thug Violence,” concluded the New York Post editorial page.
The columns were all about how Howard Beach in 2005 is not the same as Howard Beach in 1986. None of them explored what's happening in 2005 in other neighborhoods.
Andy Humm, a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights, has been in charge of the civil rights topic page since its inception in 2001. He is co-host of the weekly "Gay USA" on Manhattan Neighborhood Network (34 on Time-Warner; 107 on RCN) on Thursdays at 11 PM. Â