To prepare his background for a Zoom debate Sunday, Newton Ward 2 city council candidate Bryan Barash cleared all of his campaign signs and materials away from view, leaving in place a single item: a rainbow flag with a peace symbol.
“About two minutes into showing up, someone said, 'Hey, he can't have that flag in the background,'” Barash said. “I said it was just a rainbow peace flag, and all of a sudden there was shouting — everyone started shouting over one another.”
The flag, a standard LGBTQ+ pride flag with a “PEACE” emblem across it, had hung in Barash’s office for over a year. When asked by organizers to remove all campaign materials, social and political statements, Barash hadn’t thought that rule would apply to the flag.
“My equality isn’t my politics,” Barash wrote in a tweet on Sunday, “it’s my basic human right.”
But organizers from the neighborhood council groups hosting the debate said that if Barash chose to fly the flag in his background, he could not participate.
“Five minutes into being yelled at about this, I said, 'OK, will you stop if I take it down? And I took it down,'” he said. “But as the day went on, it sort of just really sunk in how offended I was.”
Sallee Lipshutz, a Waban area council member and debate organizer, says she had called on Barash to remove the flag as a matter of procedure — but it was nothing personal.
“When they would come up onto an auditorium dais, they would not have ... such a thing,” Lipshutz told GBH News, “and when we have run debates in prior times, we have always asked the candidates not to bring any campaign materials into the auditorium with them. Under COVID, it's very hard to set a level playing field for everybody, and so we asked that there not be any signs or buttons or anything else that made a social statement.”
Tarik Lucas, another at-large candidate for Ward 2, had something hanging in the background that looked like an American flag and was asked to remove it, Lipshutz said. Requiring Barash to remove his flag was simply a matter of procedure, Lipshutz said.
“He was not singled out in any way,” she said. “This was a procedure given to all the candidates; a set of rules.”
All of the candidates at the debate, John Oliver and Madeline Ranalli in Ward 1, and David Micley, Lucas and Barash in Ward 2, were given the opportunity to submit a short bio that would be read as their introduction to the debate.
“He could have said, ‘I'm gay,’ if that was what was important and identified him, it certainly wouldn't have caused any any controversy,” Lipshutz said. “And it would have been read, because it was submitted by the candidates and read aloud to describe who they were.”
Barash reflected on his work with the Newton Civil Rights Commission, where he says he sees incidents of bias and prejudice play out on a regular basis — even in what might consider a progressive town.
“I do think there's somewhat of a sense in liberal communities like Newton that, you know, gay rights is a done issue, that we’ve, you know, checked the box and we're moving on,” Barash said. “I think incidents like this just show that there is still a lot of bias.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Madeline Ranalli's surname.
