Feb 15, 2008  |  By: JOSHUA LYNSEN  | COMMENTS     

In a letter that’s compassionate yet forceful, the Democratic National Committee’s highest-ranking openly gay official has sought to end a discrimination lawsuit that names him among its defendants.

Andy Tobias, the DNC’s treasurer, says in an open letter distributed online Feb. 8 that the “massive lawsuit” brought by Donald Hitchcock, a gay DNC staffer who was fired two years ago, should be settled.

“We should agree to a very brief press release that basically skirts any points of contention and says, ‘Both parties regret the misunderstandings that led to this lawsuit, and the rising level of hostility it has caused, and — wishing each other well — both recommit ourselves to the cause of equality,” the letter says.

The letter, sent to the eQualityGiving.org network from Tobias’s personal e-mail account, drew a lukewarm response from Hitchcock’s attorney.

Lynne Bernabei said any settlement would require “more than saying there were misunderstandings” and entail reparations for Hitchcock.

“Mr. Hitchcock has been very damaged by the wrongful termination,” she said. “And I think there also has to be an element, if there were to be a settlement, a commitment by the DNC to do better on gay and lesbian issues, because that’s really what brought us to where we are today.”

Also in his letter, Tobias chides Hitchcock for leaking, “out of context,” only “the most damaging things” from “all the tens of thousands of pages of documents and deposition transcripts this lawsuit has produced so far.”

He says the DNC has not been fairly represented in media coverage of the lawsuit because “we haven’t been leaking our side of the story.”

The lawsuit, filed in April 2007, says Hitchcock was the target of discrimination, retaliation and defamation during and after his tenure as director of the Gay & Lesbian Leadership Council.

Hitchcock, who joined the DNC in June 2005, was fired in May 2006. The move came days after Hitchcock’s domestic partner, Paul Yandura, a longtime party activist, sent an open letter to gay Democrats criticizing DNC Chair Howard Dean and suggesting that gays should temporarily withhold donations to the Democratic Party.

The lawsuit names as defendants the DNC, Dean, Tobias and Julie Tagen, the DNC’s deputy finance director. Joe Sandler, the DNC’s general counsel, has said the charges “have no merit” and that the DNC is “committed to defending its position vigorously in court.”

Tobias says in his letter that a broader review of the situation would show Hitchcock “was not the best fit for this job, not the most effective use of donor dollars.”

As evidence, Tobias says he once asked Hitchcock to verify the 13 members of the DNC’s GLBT Americans Caucus. In the list Hitchcock provided, five names were misspelled.

Tobias says although “it’s easy to minimize” the mistake, he considered it “such a clear example of such substandard work” that he informed a superior.

In his letter, Tobias says what happened was an indicator “that this lovely guy, whom we all liked, just wasn’t maybe the guy for the job” and when combined with other missteps, led DNC officials to hope that Hitchcock “would resign so we wouldn’t have to hurt his feelings and fire him.”

The letter reiterated comments Tobias made about Hitchcock’s job performance during his Feb. 5 deposition.

“I think it was understood that he was doing a terrible job and it wasn’t working out and we liked him and wished the best for him and hoped he would resign,” Tobias says in the deposition transcript.

Bernabei, however, said that Hitchcock’s direct supervisors “never warned, reprimanded or gave a poor performance review” to him until Yandura suggested that gays should temporarily withhold their DNC donations.

She also noted that no DNC official has testified in deposition that the alleged misspellings had anything to do with Hitchcock’s firing.

“The reasons for Mr. Hitchcock’s firing seem to keep evolving and changing over time, and such inconsistencies and inaccuracies on behalf of the DNC and its agents will undoubtedly be addressed in court,” Bernabei said.