PHILADELPHIA — A federal appeals court panel on Friday upheld a lower court decision to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that Mayor Jim Kenney discriminated against Italian Americans by renaming the city’s Columbus Day holiday to Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
A year ago, U.S. District Judge C. Darnell Jones II ruled that the plaintiffs, including City Councilmember Mark Squilla and three Italian American heritage groups, had not been harmed by the decision to rename the holiday, thus none of them had standing to sue.
Third Circuit Judge David J. Porter, writing on behalf of a three-judge panel, said in his opinion filed Friday that “(t)he government does not violate the Equal Protection Clause every time it affirms or celebrates an ethnicity. Otherwise, Columbus Day itself would arguably have been an equal protection violation — but of course it wasn’t.”
