NewYork Newsday - Thursday, Februrary 9, 1995
NAME-CALLING AND NIT-PICKING IN ALBANY
by Gabriel Rotello

	New York - It was like the one-two punch from Republican hell. Last week
state Attorney General Dennis Vacco announced that he was rescinding basic
job protection for homosexuals in his office. This week state Senate Majority
Leader Joseph Bruno announced that he was banning health coverage for the
domestic partners of his senate employees. Both actions signal that a
generation of equality and inclusion in state governance is over, and that
discrimination the old fashioned way - with the support of the authorities -
is about to cast its pall over homosexuals right here in the great,
sophisticated state of New York. If, that is, the new boys have anything to sa
y about it. And they do. 
	Bruno didn't even bother to disguise his purpose, his bias or his animus.
Gay domestic partners of state employees, he said, don't deserve health
coverage because they "choose" their "lifestyles," which he termed
"abnormal." Taking a slightly more subtle but vastly more hypocritical tack,
Vacco hid behind the flimsy fiction that he was simply adhering to the letter
of the state's anti-discrimination law. Which, thanks to GOP obstructionism,
still omits sexual orientation. Legal stickler Vacco said he noticed a
discrepancy between that law and his predecessors' policy, which had banned
anti-gay discrimination for fifteen years, and just had to rectify it. He
didn't mention that in so doing he was ignoring an entire network of laws,
executive orders, legal precedents and professional practices  the very kinds
of things sticklers love to stickle to - that protect lesbians and gays from
discrimination in New York. Or ought to. 
	For starters there are the US and state constitutions, which Vacco is sworn
to uphold. Both guarantee the equal protection of the law to all citizens, no
exceptions for homosexuals. Then there's the executive order signed by
Governor Cuomo in 1983, and extended by Governor Pataki last month, that
specifically forbids discrimination against gay and lesbian employees of the
executive branch. The attorney general's office is a part of the executive
branch, so there's little question this order applies to Vacco. There's just
the question of who's going to enforce it, since Vacco is the state's chief
law enforcement officer. 
	Then there's the fact that virtually all of the state's largest
jurisdictions - New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester and
Suffolk County among them - have local ordinances banning anti-gay
discrimination. So Vacco's legalistic nit picking is badly out of sync with
the very laws under which the vast majority of his employees live and work. 
	In addition, there's the state's code of professional responsibility for
lawyers, which forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation; the codes
of most private law firms, which now customarily prohibit such discrimination
within their offices; and a state code that prohibits law firms from
recruiting in New York State's law schools unless they agree not to
discriminate against gays. Far from being a stickler, Vacco had to step over
so many constitutions, ordinances, precedents and professional codes in his
supposed zeal to adhere to the letter of the law that it's a wonder he even
bothered with the charade.  
	Some might argue that this network of protections should sufficiently shield
lesbian and gay New Yorkers from discrimiation. But it obviously didn't
prevent Vacco or Bruno from issuing their despicable orders. In that sense,
their orders are the best possible examples of why we need a gay rights law
in New York - now - and of how fragile, even nonexistent, lesbian and gay
civil rights are without it.
	Vacco says he has no plans to actually discriminate against gays in his
office. But to single out and impose fear on minority employees is itself a
pernicious form of discrimination. In that sense Vacco is already guilty.
"The high anxiety among gay people in this office," an openly gay prosecutor
told me this week, "now borders on the intolerable." And, he might have
added, not just in his office.