Jun 13, 2003  |  By: JOE CREA  | COMMENTS     

In a last minute reversal, the Department of Justice said Tuesday night that employees will be allowed to stage a gay pride event at the agency’s headquarters. The agency had earlier refused to permit any Pride celebration there.

But in what gay employees called a continued deviation from usual policy, the department will not be officially sponsoring the gathering. The decision means that employees will have to pay for event expenses themselves.

Allison Nichol, vice president of Department of Justice Pride, said a department spokesperson had hinted that budgetary concerns were behind the decision. But Nichol questioned how her group would be able to cover event expenses without help from the department.

In previous years, the department paid for the expenses, including use of the Great Hall, set-up and breakdown of microphones and added security costs as the event is held after hours.

“We’ve always covered expenses for the food, like trays of brownies and coffee, and we always pay for the awards themselves, but we’ve never had to handle these other expenses,” Nichol said. “While we welcome the partial reversal, we certainly do not think that this treatment is equal to that afforded to other groups in the department. We think that is unfortunate.”

A Justice Department spokesman told the Associated Press Tuesday night that it had never been the department’s intention to block the event, but only to make it clear that they would not financially support the gathering. The Justice Department did not return Blade calls seeking comment.

Nichol said her group is waiting to hear back from the department’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office on the cost for the event and to find out if the Great Hall is available on June 20, the date DOJ Pride hopes to hold its awards ceremony.

In a related move, the Department of Commerce’s Office of Civil Rights has announced it will not sponsor gay pride events this year. It will permit the group to celebrate the event in the Commerce building, according to a member of the department’s gay group.

The DOJ and Attorney General John Ashcroft have faced mounting criticism for the past week over the initial decision to refuse permission to the gay employee group. Some senators and ACLU officials said Ashcroft violated a promise he made during his confirmation hearings that he would not discriminate against the department’s gay employee organization.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) sent a strongly worded letter to Ashcroft urging him to reconsider his decision and threatened to take legislative action if the matter was not resolved. Lautenberg wrote that if the DOJ decision was not reversed, he would invite DOJ Pride to the Capitol to celebrate gay pride month.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) said in a statement that he asked Ashcroft during his confirmation about DOJ Pride’s use of government facilities. Ashcroft said he had “no intent to treat this group differently than any other.”
The ACLU criticized the DOJ’s initial decision not to allow the Pride event as a violation of the department’s own discrimination policy.

“DOJ Pride had an event last June, at which the second ranking official in the department spoke,” said Matt Coles, director of the ACLU’s Lesbian & Gay Rights Project. Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, the DOJ official who spoke last year, was widely criticized by conservatives for doing so.

“So clearly, the policy has changed,” Coles said. “And the only group apparently excluded under this new policy is the gay group. That looks like discrimination to me.”

Leif Erickson Day but no Pride?
The Justice Department dismissed the accusation earlier in the week saying that they did not violate their policy, but noted that an employee association cannot have an event without a presidential proclamation, the ACLU said.

Marina Colby, a department policy analyst and president of DOJ Pride, said her group is the only employee association in the department that is affected negatively by the policy.

She said President Bush has issued a series of proclamations during his tenure honoring, for example, National African American History Month, Save Your Vision Week and Leif Erikson Day, which honors the memory of the 11th century explorer. He has yet to issue a proclamation declaring June gay pride month, breaking with a precedent set in the 1990s by Bill ...