City Council Speaker Christine Quinn yesterday placed blame on Tea Party-supported GOP gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino for the shocking rise in anti-gay hate crimes in New York City. Paladino, openly anti-gay, has offered an “apology” for his anti-gay rhetoric.
Via the New York Daily News:
“Some candidates have spoken out – Mr. Paladino – in ways that are extremely offensive, extremely dangerous and it is hard to separate those statements from what is happening on the streets all throughout our city,” Quinn said.
“Last week, Paladino said children shouldn’t be “brainwashed” into thinking homosexuality is acceptable and he criticized his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, for taking his kids to a gay pride parade.
“Barman Greg Davis – who works at Julius’ Bar, the city’s oldest gay watering hole – became one of the latest hate crime victims when he was punched in the face and abused with racial and homosexual slurs last week.
“It was one punch in my right cheek, it was swollen for several days and I had three cuts inside my mouth,” Davis, 38, told the crowd at the meeting.
“Davis agreed with Quinn that Paladino’s comments played a role.
“I think they do contribute to an atmosphere of violence and intolerance and they’re dangerous,” he said.”
You’ll remember, eleven men were arrested, charged with stripping, beating, and sodomizing with a toilet plunger handle a seventeen-year old boy, and torturing another teen and then a thirty-year old man in a severe anti-gay attack in the Bronx earlier this month. In next-door Long Island, four teens were arrested after stomping, beating, and kicking a fourteen-year old fellow classmate, on two separate days. And there have been several anti-gay hate crimes in the heart of the West Village, known to be one of the most gay-friendly neighborhoods in all Manhattan.
In between these hate crimes, plus September’s ten or more teen suicides related to anti-gay bullying or bias, Paladino not only was slow or absent in responding, but took the opportunity, just one day before National Coming Out Day, to declare war on the gay and lesbian community.
Paladino is also the only candidate, of seven, running for New York State governor, who is against same-sex marriage.
Paladino said that events like gay pride parades were “disgusting” to him, yet Paladino felt comfortable forwarding bestiality, pornographic, and racist-laden emails.