Paladino kicked off committee for anti-LGBTQ remarks
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Queens City Councilmember Vickie Paladino was removed from the City Council’s Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities, and Addiction last week. John McCarten NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
A Queens city councilmember was booted from her assignment on the Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities, and Addiction as retribution for anti-LGBTQ+ remarks she made last year.
Republican City Councilmember Vickie Paladino was kicked off the committee by City Council Speaker and fellow Queens lawmaker Adrienne Adams, who said last summer that Paladino would likely face retribution from disparaging remarks she made against the LGBTQ+ community. Paladino was officially removed from the committee during a full council vote on March 2. Her removal was first reported by Gay City News.
Eight councilmembers voted against her removal, including the entire Republican conference, Queens City Councilmember Robert Holden, Councilmember Kalman Yeger and Paladino herself.
“As Speaker Adams has previously conveyed, statements of hate and intolerance – including those directed at the LGBTQIA+ community and our own members – are repugnant and unacceptable,” a spokesperson for the speaker said in a statement to the Eagle.
“Members of the Council’s Committee on Mental Health are relied upon to ensure care and services for all New Yorkers are a priority,” the spokesperson added. “The Council is voting on Council Member Paladino’s removal from this committee, because of a lack of confidence in her commitment to inclusivity that equitably reflects the needs of all New Yorkers on an essential issue of public health and safety,” said a Council spokesperson.”
In a statement to the Eagle, Paladino said that she was “disappointed” in the speaker’s decision to “ultimately cave to political pressure from a small but vocal group of radicals on the council and in the media.”
“This retaliation will not deter me in the slightest,” Paladino said, adding that an ethics investigation into comments she made accusing Drag Story Hour NYC, a nonprofit that puts on storytelling events hosted by people in drag at local libraries and schools, of grooming children did not find any wrongdoing.
“Committee assignments are supposedly meant to bring a diversity of opinion to the issues of our city, however it’s clear that any deviation from radical progressive orthodoxy will not be tolerated,” she added.
In June 2022, Paladino provoked widespread condemnation for comments she made in response to a New York Post story that said that $200,000 of taxpayer money was spent by the city last year on performances by the group Drag Story Hour NYC, a nonprofit that aims to teach children “about gender diversity and all forms of difference to build empathy and give kids the confidence to express themselves.”
Posting to Twitter, Paladino, a Republican who represents a large portion of Northeast Queens, evoked language increasingly used by Republican politicians aiming to curtail LGBTQ+ rights throughout the country.
“Progressives may have no problem with child grooming and sexualization, but I do,” Paladino said. “This will not happen on my watch. Kids deserve a quality education free from political manipulation and sexual content.”
Despite calls for sanctions from her colleagues in the council, Paladino refused to retract her statements.
In her statement issued Monday, Paladino said that her “position on Drag Queen Story Hour in our schools is morally and factually correct.”
“I believe individuals who support it are actively harming children,” she said. “It is repugnant that our city is funding and promoting the sexualization and indoctrination of children in this way, and it is even more repugnant that speaking out for what’s right is apparently a punishable offense in our Council.”
Shortly after Paladino made the remarks in June, her colleagues condemned them on the council floor. Queens City Councilmember Lynn Schulman, who was one of the first out LGBTQ+ women to serve as a lawmaker in Queens, was brought to tears by her colleagues remarks.
On Monday, the council’s Common Sense Caucus, which includes the council’s Republican members, as well as Holden and Yeger, defended Paladino.
“At best, this is hypocrisy; at worst, this deviation from the Council’s own rules undermines the integrity of this institution,” the caucus said in a statement.
There were 97 confirmed hate crime incidents committed against LGBTQ+ New Yorkers in 2022 and 98 the year prior, according to the NYPD. There were 40 anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes committed in the five boroughs in 2020, NYPD data shows.
