Soon Brooklyn will have a man, Noach Dear, as one of its Civil Court judges. This is a man who never seems to have practiced law in his life and has been declared unqualified to be a judge by the NYC Bar Assn. How did this man become judge? Because a handful of politicians decided it would be politically convenient for him to be shoved aside on a court bench, essentially making the Brooklyn court system a political garbage dump. This is what these backroom politicians think of Brooklyn.

Things were supposed to change once Clarence Norman was in jail. That is what people keep telling me. Brooklyn politics will be better now that Clarence Norman is out of the way. No more unqualified judges, some told me. They had their chance to prove that this year and, to some degree, there certainly was an improvement in the quality of judges endorsed by the political insiders of Brooklyn. But they spoiled that effect by bringing out possibly one of their worst choices ever for a judge. Well, now the proof is in the pudding and this time the pudding is the unqualified Judge Noach Dear. Who delivered this unsavory pudding on our plates? These politicians:

Brooklyn Borough President and Angry Clown Marty Markowitz [1]
Assemblyman and head of the Brooklyn Democratic machine Vito Lopez [2]
City Councilman Dominic Recchia [3]
City Councilman Vincent Gentile
City Councilman Kendall Stewart
State Senator Diane Savino
Assemblyman Dov Hikind

These are the Noach Dear Democrats. These are the so-called leaders who pushed an unqualified sleaze onto our court system. I thought that wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. Well it is still happening. Where is the big change we were promised? Apparently that promise went the way of so many promises these people make to us.

Let me review a little what these people shoved down our throats.

From Lambda Independent Democrats:

Dear is a notorious anti-choice, homophobic bigot who led the fight against New York City's gay rights bill. Moreover, Dear has been deemed "unqualified" by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, failed the bar exam twice and is not known to have practiced law. As the New York Times noted in an editorial on September 10, Dear's "volatile personality and indifference to conflicts-of-interest make[s] him utterly unsuited for the bench."

If we wanted an anti-choice, anti-gay judge we could vote for the Republican candidate, Jim McCall. At least, from all I hear, he is qualified, has practiced law and is generally considered a reasonable guy. I am not in the habit of supporting Republicans and I don’t really want to start now. But by forcing Judge Noach Dear down our throats, Marty Markowitz, Vito Lopez and Dominic Recchia are making the Republican candidate look good. Democrats nominate someone who is unqualified. How does THAT make us look in the district.?

From Gatemouth [4], a blog personality who seldom agrees with the editors of Daily Gotham (myself in particular):

However, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Dear's anti-gay record is not merely a matter of quietly voting his conscience (as if he had one); it is possible to be wrong on the issue without exploiting hatred; Peter Vallone voted against gay rights without ever using it to make cheap points. It would have been one thing if Dear merely voted wrong on the issues. But, Dear's record is not merely one of bad votes; it is one of stoking the fires of hatred for his own poltical benefit (as when he taped Anthony Weiner's Q & A Before the Lambda Independent Democrats, and then shopped the video all around Orthodox Brookyln). Dear's bad votes should not necessarily disqualify him from this position (although they would still require expanation and discussion), but his bad behavior exploiting hatred should be a permanent bar to his holding judicial office (as should some of his non-social issue related bad conduct)...

[Dear] is the Garson family with a yarmulke, or as one Orthodox Jewish member of our bench once told me, an indictment waiting to happen. And let's not forget his lovely temperment! Even without his reactionary social views, Dear would be a blot on our judiciary.

I should give credit where credit is due. It was Gatemouth who first called my attention to the impending disaster of Judge Noach Dear.

From Daily Gotham's own Managing Editor, Michael Bouldin [5]:

For an example of what we need to avoid, look no further than that Democratic bastion, Brooklyn. It has the lowest voter participation rates in the state. After the next election, the borough will be soiled by the presence on a court bench of Noach Dear, a noted bigot and racist, thereby neatly ending the possibility of justice in that courtroom for gay and Muslim New Yorkers.

Sounds like quite a condemnation of the Brooklyn Democratic leadership…most of whom seem to have endorsed Noach Dear and none of which seem to inspire much voter turnout among Democrats in Brooklyn. How does Marty Markowitz [6] expect to be mayor if he can’t inspire voter turnout in Brooklyn and if he alienates the gay political clubs by endorsing a known homophobe? How can Dominic Recchia become Congressman or Brooklyn BP (he seems to be fishing for both positions) if he is part of such a lackluster and irresponsible organization?

From wikipedia [7]:

During his unsuccessful run for the Ninth District congressional seat representing Brooklyn and Queens, auditors found that Dear and campaign treasurer Abraham Roth—a certified public accountant—accepted "several sets of sequentially numbered money orders." The money, purportedly from 47 individual contributors, totaled about $40,000. When interviewed, however, those whose names appeared on the money orders told FEC investigators they had never made donations to Dear's committee.

Nor were fraudulent money orders the only problem the audit found. In his 1998 campaign, Dear accepted a whopping $564,000 in contributions that exceeded federal limits, according to the FEC. Dear's committee agreed to return the excess contributions, and in its midyear 1999 filing claimed to have done just that, making refunds of more than $300,000. But that wasn't true either, auditors discovered. In fact, the complaint stated, the refunds were never made. As late as June 2003, when the FEC, unable to get Dear to agree to pay up, filed its complaint, he still had failed to refund more than $200,000 of the excess contributions...

In yet another ethical lapse, in 1993, Dear agreed to repay more than $37,000 to a private foundation that paid for expenses like telephones in his home and trips abroad by his children, under a civil settlement announced by Robert Abrams, then New York Attorney General.

According to The New York Times, "Richard Barr, a spokesman for Mr. Abrams, said that Mr. Dear, a conservative Brooklyn Democrat elected in 1982, broke laws governing charities when he used money from a foundation he helped create to pay for expenses ranging from calls from his car phone to a plane ticket for his wife."

Wow…really seems like things have changed since Clarence Norman is in jail. We got criminals for judges then…and now we have Judge Noach Dear, sometimes described as an “indictment waiting to happen.” Big change.

From a Village Voice article [8]:

Dear started out as manager of his neighborhood's community board. When a wave of landlord arson and harassment drove hundreds of elderly and minority tenants from their homes on Borough Park's fringes in the early 1980s, Dear said he never noticed a thing. This shrewd perspective made him ideal for the council job, which he won in 1983...

As chairman of the council's human-rights committee in 1990, Dear organized a trip to South Africa for what he said was an apartheid fact-finding mission. Several black colleagues recruited for the trip bailed out, however, when Dear acknowledged that the junket was funded by the whites-only Johannesburg city council...

Prior to that, Dear had expanded the council's foreign-policy horizons by persuading a group of New York–based Sri Lankan Tamils, who were seeking publicity for their cause, that he would be their champion. In short order, the Tamils were paying for Dear to fly to Europe and investing $170,000 in his dairy restaurant. The loan soon went down the tubes along with the blintzes. The Tamils sued, claiming it was a personal loan. Dear countered that it was just an unlucky investment.

Noach Dear was unqualified yet was placed on the court for political convenience. How is this different than placing Mike Brown, a failed racehorse inspector, in charge of FEMA? The consequences for average citizens are very real in both cases. To quote a generally level-headed friend of mine, “I just can't stop thinking about what it would be like to be a party to a lawsuit being heard by Dear.” How can you trust politicians who are willing to sacrifice not only their values, but our court system to backroom political deals?

I join with Lambda Independent Democrats and Stonewall Democrats is saying this: We will remember all of our fellow Democrats who supported a blatantly unqualified homophobe for judge. We need to hold each and every one of them accountable whenever they run for office. Keep this list...and vote accordingly.

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