Bloomberg Makes Right Turn: Stephen Goldsmith, new top deputy, boosted faith-based government spending, has ties to leading social conservatives
Bloomberg Turns Right
Stephen Goldsmith, new top deputy, boosted faith-based government spending, has ties to leading social conservatives
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
“Lots of people talk about ‘reinventing government,’ Steve Goldsmith has actually done it, leading the storied turnaround of Indianapolis,” Bloomberg said in an April 30 press statement. “He exemplifies pragmatic, nonpartisan leadership, and we’re thrilled to welcome him to City Hall.”
What Bloomberg did not tell New Yorkers is that Goldsmith has longstanding ties to social conservatives, including some of the most ardent anti-gay right-wingers in America, and that some parts of his résumé might be troubling to gay taxpayers here.
Goldsmith, who was the mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, currently teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and he has been sought out by leading Republicans and Democrats as an innovator in privatizing and delivering government services.
One 2002 study reported that Goldsmith held 93 “rounds of competition” in which city employees and private companies bid to provide various services that had previously been delivered by city government. It is not clear that this saved money or improved services, but that is the assumption that supports such competition.
Prior to his stint at the Kennedy School, Goldsmith was the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal government agency that oversees the AmeriCorps program. He was appointed to that job in 2001 by President George W. Bush. In the 2000 presidential campaign, Goldsmith was a Pioneer, meaning he raised more than $100,000 for the Bush campaign.
Goldsmith was the domestic policy advisor for the Bush campaign and a leading proponent in the Bush administration of providing government funds to faith-based institutions to deliver social services.
In 1999, he told the Washington Post that then-candidate Bush, in endorsing the funding of such groups, thought that “a very important secondary goal is transforming lives through a belief in God and value systems.”
In 2001, Goldsmith said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that faith-based groups getting government dollars could discriminate in hiring “on the basis of religion.” At the time, the case of Alicia Pedreira, who was fired from her job as a therapist and residential counselor at the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children in 1998 because she was a lesbian, was making headlines nationally. (Last August, a federal appeals court allowed a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of Pedreira, challenging the constitutionality of state funding for that facility, to go forward.)
From 1979 to 1990, Goldsmith was the prosecutor in Marion County, which includes Indianapolis, and was a noted anti-porn crusader. He worked with Citizens for Decency Through Law, an organization run by Alan Sears, who now heads the Alliance Defense Fund, a non-profit legal group that represents social conservatives and has challenged numerous gay rights advances in court.
Attesting to his zeal in the fight against pornography, in 1985, Goldsmith was invited to testify before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, which had Sears as its executive director. Known as the Meese Commission, for Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese, its members included James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, and Father Bruce Ritter, a Roman Catholic priest and founder of Covenant House, who often raised funds by charging that the homeless youth sheltered there had been victimized by predatory homosexuals when they lived on the streets. Ritter, who died in 1999, was forced to leave his position at Covenant House when it was revealed that he had had sex with male Covenant House clients.
Goldsmith also received some national attention when he prosecuted a gay prostitution ring in 1990. He had a list of more than 500 hustlers and their clients and considered requiring all of them to take HIV tests in exchange for getting immunity from prosecution. Michael Lee Gradison, who headed the Indiana Civil Liberties Union at the time, said he recalled that the testing requirement was never carried out.
“That particular undertaking got lost,” he told Gay City News. Gradison remembered Goldsmith as “very smart” and someone who can “put aside partisan concerns.” He did not recall that Goldsmith was interested in the gay community.
“He hasn’t shown any particular sensitivity toward the gay community’s concerns,” Gradison said.
Various right-wing groups, including Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for Decency Through Law, and the Free Congress Foundation, gave awards to Goldsmith in the 1980s and ’90s.
As mayor of Indianapolis, Goldsmith successfully reinvented himself, becoming, like Bloomberg, a nonpartisan technocrat. He has authored or co-authored six books, written book chapters, and published editorials and articles in newspapers or journals, all of them discussing the reinvention government or related urban issues. Gay City News found little from Goldsmith on gay or AIDS issues.
“In terms of gay and lesbian issues, Steve never had a real opportunity to speak up or do anything about it,” said Mark St. John, a governmental affairs consultant who lobbies for Indiana Equality, a gay rights group, who first met Goldsmith in 1978. “He’s an economic conservative. I don’t see him as a social conservative.”
Comments