Howard Dean = Douchebag?

Expect the good doctor to catch a lot of crap for this move-

Washington Blade: Dean fires Dems' gay outreach chief

Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean on May 2 fired the party's gay outreach advisor Donald Hitchcock less than a week after Hitchcock's domestic partner, Paul Yandura, a longtime party activist, accused Dean of failing to take stronger action to defend gays...

Did Dean fire Hitchcock because of his partner's criticism? Seems likely.

Shame on you, Mr. Dean. Your party is supposed to be the party of tolerance and social change. But between moves like this and President Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act/Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell two-fer in the '90s, it's clear you are failing to live up to that in respect to the gay community. Even Sen. Kerry didn't speak out against the gay marriage ban initiatives in 2004 for fail of alienating homophobic swing voters. Some Democrats get it, of course. Russ Feingold gets it. Al Gore does too. But those are also the Democrats that the party establishment has marginalized in recent years (though less so with Gore, since he's out of office).

With the Republican Party planning another round of gay marriage ban initiatives this summer (and right when there's an election coming up- gosh, what a coincidence!), the Democratic Party has a moral obligation to speak and denounce this bigotry. They need to expose these efforts as not only transparently political, but also socially backwards. They need to tell voters to focus on the real issues (the war, the monstrous national debt, corruption, the Gulf Coast, etc.) and not on the trumped-up 'values' issues the Republicans dig up every two years to placate the far-right. They also need to reclaim their role as the civil rights party and embrace the inevitable support of equal marriage rights.

Judging by what we've seen to date, I'm less than hopeful, to say the least.

[PS- Other blogs weigh in (and thanks to them for the heads up too):
-AmericaBlog: Howard Dean fires gay man in apparent retaliation against his partner
-Andrew Sullivan: Dean's Revenge]