365Gay Agenda Blog

Eliot Spitzer, Vito Fossella, Bill Clinton. The Staten Island Advance asks: what do these three men have in common…?

Hypocrisy, thy name is Vito. Fossella, that is. U.S. Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) is a right-wing Republican who represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn in the House.

Fossella opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and the Family and Medical Leave Act as well as same-sex marriage and earned a zero percent rating on the HRC legislative scorecard.

A self-appointed champion of ‘family values ,’ the Congressman has never extended those family values to include his an openly lesbian sister, who has marched in Staten Island’s pride parade with her partner. But brother Vito has never publicly acknowledged his sister or her partner. “He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said,” the Daily News has reported. Fossella voted for the federal marriage amendment that would condemn one of his own family members to permanent second-class citizenship.

But the self-righteous Fossella now finds himself in a career-ending scandal of his own making. After being arrested on drunk driving charges in Virginia last week, Fossella was forced to acknowledge on Thursday that he had fathered a child with a mistress in the context of a long-standing extra-marital affair — which makes for a total of two crimes, since adultery is technically still a crime in the Old Dominion.
Fossella in many ways is the stereotypical Catholic Italian American ‘Guido’ from Staten Island. Not surprisingly, revelations about Fossella’s drunk driving arrest in Virginia and ‘love child’ with mistress Laura Fay have not played well on Staten Island or in Bay Ridge and the other conservative neighborhoods of Brooklyn that also comprise the district.

“Vito Fossella’s well-deserved shame at being arrested for driving while intoxicated last week evolved rapidly in the interim into abject disgrace,” the Staten Island Advance thundered in an editorial in its May 9 edition. The only daily on the island and an influential paper read by busy commuters every morning on the Staten Island ferry, the Advance called on the Congressman to resign his house seat “immediately.” While not mentioning the hypocrisy of his defense of ‘traditional’ marriage, the Advance did note the hypocrisy of Fossella’s strong advocacy against drunk driving while engaging the very same practice.

The Brooklyn Paper joined the Advance in calling for Fossella’s resignation. “Regardless of the outcome of Fossella’s legal and personal struggles, voters in Bay Ridge and Staten Island will simply not be served during the final six months of Fossella’s current term unless the six-term congressman resigns immediately,” the Brooklyn paper declared in an editorial in its May 10 issue.

“That Fossella betrayed his wife and family is between him and them,” said the New York Post, which has a large readership on Staten Island and in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge. “But his betrayal of his constituents was only marginally less egregious,” the Post declared in an editorial in its May 9 edition. “Vito Fossella needs to just go away,” snapped the Post. “Now.”

Coming after the sex scandal that brought down Governor Eliot Spitzer in March, the Fossella scandal has dominated local TV news in New York for the last two days. The Republican pol has now been dubbed ‘Vino’ Fossella for his DWI arrest, and there’s even a new website devoted to “chronicling the DWI arrest of Rep. Vito Fossella at www.VinoFossella.com.

But the Fossella affair has potentially national implications, with Democrats poised to increase their majority in the House and Senate in the Congressional elections in November.

The 13th district is the last House district in the five boroughs still represented by a Republican, but despite the widely held impression in New York that Staten Island is a rock-ribbed Republican bastion, there are actually more Democrats than Republicans in the 13th. And while George W. Bush carried the 13th district by 10 points in 2004, as Steve Kornacki points out in the New York Observer, Al Gore actually beat Bush here by 8% in 2000. So there is a real chance that a Democrat could take Fossella’s seat in November, which would make New York City’s House delegation all-Democrat for the first time in modern political history.