Appeals court says Kenney did not discriminate against Italian Americans by renaming Columbus Day holiday to Indigenous Peoples’ Day

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.”

Porter added: “Plaintiffs might be able to show injury under the Equal Protection Clause if Philadelphia celebrated every ethnicity but conspicuously excluded Italian Americans.”

The judge wrote: “To the extent that Plaintiffs seek redress for this offense, their remedy is political, not legal.”

Lawyer George Bochetto, who filed the lawsuit, vowed to appeal.

“While we are disappointed in the ruling by the Third Circuit, I have every intention of pursuing the matter in the United States Supreme Court,” Bochetto said in an email Friday evening.

Bochetto was victorious last month in a separate lawsuit, when the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ordered the city of Philadelphia to remove the box covering the Christopher Columbus statue in South Philadelphia. The box was installed in June 2020 with the intention of having the statue eventually removed. The move by the city came amid the racial justice protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.