A former California legislator has issued an apology to Jews, women and homosexuals as part of a $20,000 settlement in a defamation suit against him here.
According to the World Jewish Congress Unit on the Documentation of International Anti-Semitism, the apology by former State Sen. John Schmitz was read in open court last Friday in settlement of a $10 million defamation suit arising from a press release issued by Schmitz’s office in 1981.
Schmitz, a former member of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, had issued the news release after a feminist attorney had handed him a chastitybelt to protest his views during legislative hearings on a proposed anti-abortion measure.
The release denounced witnesses opposing the measure as “imported lesbians from anti-male and pro-abortion queer groups in San Francisco.” The audience at the hearing was described as “a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces.”
Fueling further outrage is the disclosure that the settlement, as well as Schmitz’s $30 thousand in legal bills, will be paid from California state funds. Although the State Senate had previously censured Schmitz, its Rules Committee had voted in executive session to pay for the settlement.
Gloria Allred, the successful complainant, who had been described in Schmitz’s release as “a slick butch lawyeress,” said the Senate’s assumption of the settlement’s cost was “an insult to the taxpayers,” adding that she would donate the $20 thousand to groups named in the dispute.
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