« On the Trail of Brooklyn’s Underground Railroad | Main | Brian Lehrer Live: Online Battles: Atlantic Yards, Apartment Hunting, and Net Neutrality »
October 12, 2007
Marty skips gay Atlantic Yards talk
The Brooklyn Paper
By Dana Rubenstein
Borough President Markowitz has declined a gay Democratic club’s invitation to herald the positives of the Atlantic Yards project at a forum later this month, and, while he’s there, explain why he supported a notoriously homophobic Borough Park politician in his race for a Civil Court seat, telling the president of the group in an e-mail, “I have little interest in becoming someone’s punching bag.”
Markowitz had been invited to speak at the Lambda Independent Democrats forum on Oct. 22 after asking club leaders for a private meeting at which he could explain his endorsement of homophobic former City Councilman Noach Dear for the judgeship.
“I called you about the [Noach] Dear endorsement because I have, for all my years in public service, been a strong supporter of the LGBT community,” read Markowitz’s Sept. 18 e-mail to LID Co-President Christopher Murray. “My call to you had nothing to do with Atlantic Yards, which is a totally different subject, and I have little interest in becoming someone’s punching bag.”
...
“Marty had requested that we have a private meeting,” said Fleishman. “We decided as a club that we didn’t want to discuss it in private, and that we were planning on inviting him to a forum to discuss Atlantic Yards.”
Posted by lumi at October 12, 2007 5:14 AM