Today the City Council voted to disband a committee homophobic, bigoted, and misogynistic councilman Ruben Diaz Sr was chair of after he refused to apologize for his homophobic remarks where he said that the NYC Council, “…was controlled by the homosexual community.”
The Committee on For-Hire Vehicles will now have issues handled by the Taxi & Limousine Commission which really should have been the one handling it all in the first place.
Diaz Sr is now also claiming to be the victim here has he doubles down in his refusal to apologize. He didn’t even have the decency to face the music and was missing from today’s council vote.
As we said before and today Gothamist fleshed out even further, this hateful rhetoric has been enabled by his buddies that make up the Bronx Democratic Machine.
Gothamist writes:
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” and could lead children “to conclude that if there are so many gay and lesbian athletes then there is nothing wrong, nor any risks involved.”
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.
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.
Diaz Sr.’s relentless homophobia didn’t deter Johnson, who is HIV positive, from offering Diaz a newly-created committee overseeing for-hire vehicles. The Bronx Democratic Party had coalesced around Johnson’s speaker candidacy and Diaz, who is close to the Bronx party boss, Assemblyman Marcos Crespo, was a loyal soldier.
Perhaps the only reason that he’s actually being called out now is because Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr has his eyes on becoming mayor?
At any rate, we’re glad that the council has removed him from this position. Now Ruben Diaz Sr just needs to resign and if not, perhaps the city council can vote on that too.
There is no room for hate in NYC or this world. We’ve already seen what his kind of talk does around the country.
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