Deplorable Yankee
Diamond Member
The Unrepentant Bigotry Of Ruben Diaz, Sr. Has Been Enabled By Democrats For Years
BY ROSS BARKAN IN NEWS ON FEB 13, 2019 11:07 AM
It was the summer of 2016 and Ruben Diaz Sr. was getting back surgery.
The septuagenarian state senator was fed up with Albany. The pay was too low and the commute too long. A City Council seat was opening up. He was thinking seriously about running for it.
As he lay in the hospital, an unexpected visitor came not once, but twice. He kept up afterward via email. The two men liked to schmooze about politics.
Corey Johnson, the eager hospital visitor, wanted to be speaker of the City Council.
Two and a half years later, Johnson, who indeed got that speakership shortly after Diaz Sr. won the open Council seat, is now calling for his old friend to resign. A chorus of City Council members, some of them gay like Johnson, want Diaz Sr. to go for telling a Spanish language station the City Council is “controlled by the homosexual community.”
Diaz Sr., who is also a cowboy hat-wearing Pentecostal reverend, is unrepentant. He is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ community writ large. In a brief interview with Gothamist, he refused to apologize. He said he would be holding a press conference and rally on Thursday outside his district office in the Bronx. “Thank you very much, I have to go now,” he said, hanging up.
These controversies are not new for the Democrat. If anything, his latest bout of homophobia is tame by past standards. He once equated being gay to “having sex with animals” and attacked the 1994 Gay Games in New York because he said the participants were “likely infected with AIDS”
He sued to stop a high school for gay and transgender students from opening. In 2016, he proudly campaigned for president with Ted Cruz, the right-wing Republican senator from Texas.
For the uninitiated, Diaz Sr.’s position of prominence in New York’s political constellation can seem mystifying. How has an openly bigoted member of the Democratic Party in the Bronx, the home of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—Diaz Sr. represents her Parkchester neighborhood—survived this long in office? Counting a prior stint in the City Council, he has held office continually since 2002—enabled by a Bronx Democratic apparatus, and powerful politicians like Johnson, who have continually looked the other way.
The Unrepentant Bigotry Of Ruben Diaz, Sr. Has Been Enabled By Democrats For Years
BY ROSS BARKAN IN NEWS ON FEB 13, 2019 11:07 AM
It was the summer of 2016 and Ruben Diaz Sr. was getting back surgery.
The septuagenarian state senator was fed up with Albany. The pay was too low and the commute too long. A City Council seat was opening up. He was thinking seriously about running for it.
As he lay in the hospital, an unexpected visitor came not once, but twice. He kept up afterward via email. The two men liked to schmooze about politics.
Corey Johnson, the eager hospital visitor, wanted to be speaker of the City Council.
Two and a half years later, Johnson, who indeed got that speakership shortly after Diaz Sr. won the open Council seat, is now calling for his old friend to resign. A chorus of City Council members, some of them gay like Johnson, want Diaz Sr. to go for telling a Spanish language station the City Council is “controlled by the homosexual community.”
Diaz Sr., who is also a cowboy hat-wearing Pentecostal reverend, is unrepentant. He is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ community writ large. In a brief interview with Gothamist, he refused to apologize. He said he would be holding a press conference and rally on Thursday outside his district office in the Bronx. “Thank you very much, I have to go now,” he said, hanging up.
These controversies are not new for the Democrat. If anything, his latest bout of homophobia is tame by past standards. He once equated being gay to “having sex with animals” and attacked the 1994 Gay Games in New York because he said the participants were “likely infected with AIDS”
He sued to stop a high school for gay and transgender students from opening. In 2016, he proudly campaigned for president with Ted Cruz, the right-wing Republican senator from Texas.
For the uninitiated, Diaz Sr.’s position of prominence in New York’s political constellation can seem mystifying. How has an openly bigoted member of the Democratic Party in the Bronx, the home of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—Diaz Sr. represents her Parkchester neighborhood—survived this long in office? Counting a prior stint in the City Council, he has held office continually since 2002—enabled by a Bronx Democratic apparatus, and powerful politicians like Johnson, who have continually looked the other way.
The Unrepentant Bigotry Of Ruben Diaz, Sr. Has Been Enabled By Democrats For Years
