Plus: Faulting Ferraro and Backing Obama
I always felt a strong empathy for women and their fight for equality.
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By Allen Roskoff
Friday, May 23, 2008
Politico Michael Colosi and I attended the annual summer party of Joe Eviatar and Eric Johnson. I always look forward to it because they have some great friends and they throw a great party. If you need Lasik surgery, Joe is the best. Anyway, a rich twit from the Pines asked for my opinion of Mayor Bloomberg. I told him that I thought very little of him and never voted for him. He replied that he wished he could run for another term and that he is a great mayor.
Bruce, here is a more lengthy explanation of why Bloomberg has been a bad mayor and certainly no friend of the LGBT community.
• We fought long and hard with previous mayors to establish an Office of Lesbian and Gay Affairs (which would now be LGBT Affairs). Unfortunately Bloomberg did away with it. Since then I have asked several well-connected gay politicos where to go in the mayor’s Office for help on LGBT issues and I get a lot of head shaking—they don’t know and neither do I.
• Bloomberg LP, the company the mayor founded and ran before he took the reins of the city, seems like a horror show. Where is the outrage over the fact that Bloomberg’s company has been hit with class action suits, alleging discrimination against pregnant women? Why hasn’t City Council Speaker Chris Quinn called any press conferences on this issue? In addition, Bloomberg’s company has a history of spying on its employees, not unlike the city’s current efforts to adopt a palm-card, time-keeping system for city employees.
• Bloomberg, through the city’s law department, sued to block marriage equality for same sex couples all the way to the state’s highest court. And notwithstanding all of his promises at that time, the mayor has done little or nothing to support marriage equality legislation in Albany. He has not lobbied the Republican legislators who are blocking the bill, even as he continues to send them money to promote their anti-progressive agenda.
To add insult to injury, he did not offer even one word of support when the Democrat-led State Assembly passed the bill last summer or when the California Supreme Court issued their pro marriage decision this month. By comparison, Mayor Galvin Newsom of San Francisco was practically dancing in the streets.
• The Bloomberg administration has continued to crack down on marijuana users, making New York City the marijuana arrest capital of the world, even though the mayor himself admitted to using marijuana in his youth.
• As far as I know, Bloomberg has never demonstrated in support of any cause whatsoever. Instead, his administration is at war with our freedom of speech and assembly, aggressively arresting demonstrators time and time again. The NYPD under Bloomberg has also denied permits for parades and protests and interfered with the rights of individuals to join these events.
• On the issue of AIDS, Bloomberg’s Executive funding for Division for Aids Services declines $289,000 to $153,285 in fiscal year 2009. Again, where are the protests?
• During the time that Bloomberg was flirting with a run for the presidency, he criticized the major party candidates for not addressing critical issues. But he himself has had little to say about the most important issue of our time: the war in Iraq. Instead, he has criticized anti-war protesters, made it next to impossible to protest and employed the NYPD to arrest protesters.
• Similarly, Bloomberg directed the NYPD to arrest thousands of demonstrators—and bystanders—during the Republican Convention in NYC four years ago. These arrests were illegal, and the Manhattan District Attorney has dismissed most cases or thrown them out of court. As a result, the city now is paying out millions of dollars to settle the lawsuits.
• The NYPD under Bloomberg is out of control, and its obsessive CompStat program (a COMPuter STATistics program that maps crime) compromises civil rights and civil liberties by its use of questionable stops and searches of persons of color.
• Bloomberg’s economic policies have favored the wealthy and done little or nothing to preserve affordable housing in New York. As a result, artists and young people have been chased from the Village. LGBT people have left for monetary reasons but also because we no longer felt welcome in our neighborhoods. Many fear that Chelsea is next.
• In addition, there is the matter of nightlife. During the Bloomberg administration, nightlife has been under siege. Bar and club raids are common, particularly against those serving the LGBT community. The enforcement of every picayune regulation is strangling the industry and with it our ability to get together. Nightlife is why so many of us moved to our neighborhoods in the first place. Now community boards are taking their cues from the mayor and demanding that some bars close at 2 a.m.
At a recent Community Board Four meeting (on which I am a member), dozens of gays had to plead to keep open Bamboo 52, a quiet bar and restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen and a staple of our community. The chairperson of Community Board Four, which covers both Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, has appointed a decisive majority of anti-nightlife individuals to the committee dealing with liquor licenses. This was in spite of requests by many of us for the committee to be balanced.
If you don’t want to lose even more bars and clubs, please speak out at Community Board meetings. Community Board Four meets the first Wednesday of each month. For location and times, email me at the address below.
Unfortunately part of Bloomberg’s power derives from the complacency and obedience of Speaker Quinn, who apparently is looking for Bloomberg’s assistance in her race for mayor next year. She has willingly sacrificed her independence and became his lapdog. It is now a rare occasion that she differs in opinion from him.
• Finally and maybe most important, dear Bruce, Mayor Bloomberg is perhaps the largest single donor to the anti-gay Republican party, not just in the state but in the nation as well. He personally helped bankroll the election of homophobe and pro-war George W. Bush. That alone should prevent any LGBT person from supporting him or any other candidate he might endorse.
That is why I dislike Michael Bloomberg. Any more political questions, Bruce?
Allen Roskoff is a longtime gay rights activist and co-author and
lobbyist for the nation’s first gay civil rights bill. He is now
president of the citywide Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club. He can be
reached at aroskoff@aol.com. You can read about his date with Bea Arther here.
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