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Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Jul 28, 2010
A Milwaukee city worker is back on the job after agreeing to apologize to a gay man she harassed via her government e-mail account.
Donna Luty, an administrative assistant with the Port of Milwaukee, was suspended without pay in mid-July after a man complained to city officials that she’d sent him e-mails from her office computer filled with Christian right anti-gay rhetoric.
Gordon Jablonski, a former Wisconsin resident who now lives in New Jersey, described Luty as a peripheral acquaintance from several years ago. He said she contacted him after seeing pictures on Facebook of his nuptials with another man. “You know you are living in sin and will burn in hell if you don’t change your life around,” Luty wrote in an e-mail that Jablonski shared with WiG. “I’m sorry to hear you married another man. God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve.”
“I wrote back and said, ‘What you’re saying to me is inappropriate, wrong and hurtful. I have the right to choose my own religion,’” Jablonski said.
But Jablonski said despite his objection and his request that Luty stop contacting him, she continued to write.
Milwaukee employee relations director Maria Monteagudo said she immediately sent Luty home after learning of the harassment and launched an investigation to determine whether the behavior was an isolated incident or part of a pattern. Her office reviewed three months of e-mails sent from Luty’s city account and questioned co-workers to ascertain whether Luty tried to impose her religious views on them at the workplace.
In the end, the employee relations office determined that the e-mails were an isolated incident and Luty was allowed to return to work if she’d agree to apologize to Jablonski, according to Monteagudo.
What Luty did was “very wrong,” Monteagudo said.
In addition to contacting city officials about the harassment, Jablonski alerted local media, Fair Wisconsin and the national organization GLAD.
“If she’d done that from her home computer, it would have been a different story,” Jablonski said. “But she’s a government employee. She represents diversity. She represents all of us. It’s hard enough in this country, where we don’t have protections for our marriage or anything else.”
Fair Wisconsin executive director Katie Belanger said she was “extremely disappointed that a city of Milwaukee worker would use her city e-mail account to express discrimination and hateful messages.”
“It’s an important reminder that discrimination still happens all around Wisconsin, and we need to remain vigilant in the fight against (it),” Belanger said.
