It’s sometimes tough to believe, but New York City Councilor Ruben Diaz Sr. can always get even worse. Diaz, a very conservative Bronx Democrat who is seeking New York’s safely blue 15th Congressional District, attended a mandatory City Council sensitivity-training session on Wednesday—yeah, you can already tell this is gonna be a doozy—only to make it very clear how little he wanted to be there and exactly what he thinks about reporting sexual harassment.
The New York Daily News’ Anna Sanders writes that the councilmembers were presented with a hypothetical scenario in which they were “asked what they should do if they overheard a chief of staff making sexually inappropriate comments in an elevator” that “visibly upset” a female staffer. There are correct responses, there are incorrect responses, and then there’s Diaz’s response: According to multiple city councilmembers present, Diaz interrupted the presentation to scream, “I’m not gonna rat my people out! This place is full of rats!”
One unnamed witness says City Council Speaker Corey Johnson countered by telling Diaz that member have a “responsibility to protect people from sexual harassment,” to which Diaz responded by arguing and talking over Johnson—and then some. Back in February, Diaz was stripped of his committee chairmanship after declaring the council was "controlled by the homosexual community" in a radio interview. At this week’s sensitivity training, Diaz declared he’d been “bullied” as a result of his own comment. In response, Sanders writes that “several council members stormed out of the room and others made noise to purposely drown out his rant.”
Diaz, who is a Pentecostal minister, told the paper that he believed the council “harassed” him because of his faith. Diaz also said that, despite what he’d reportedly hollered, sexual harassment must be reported. However, he quickly added that sometimes “sexual harassment is a compliment.” He went on to ask the paper, “You are a woman? We are in an elevator … and they give you a compliment, like, wow, how nice you look—maybe you like it, I don’t know.” Diaz went on, “If you don’t like it, and then you say something, then I know.” He concluded his disquisition by going full Godwin, declaring of the council, “What they want is something really like the Gestapo.”
Diaz has a very long and ugly history of homophobic commentary, but up until now, none of that has stopped him from repeatedly winning Democratic primaries in the Bronx. And as we’ve written before, it’s very possible he’ll pull off a win next year in the primary for the 15th Congressional District, a Bronx seat that gave Hillary Clinton 94% of the vote, if too many opponents split the non-Ruben Diaz vote.
