Looks like it’s time to play the hottest new political game — spot the extremist. This was set up by Gov. Cuomo’s tirade about how “extreme conservatives, who are right-to-life, pro assault weapon, anti-gay,” have “no place in the state of New York, because that is not who New Yorkers are.”
The governor is now insisting that what he meant by “no place in the state of New York” was merely the inability to win elections in the Empire State; it’s clear he’s embarrassed by his own honesty. He’s on the hunt for extremists who, in his view, have no place in New York. The question is where to find them.
Let’s start with the first item on Cuomo’s extremist list — abortion. Maybe he can find some extremists at NYC41Percent.com. This is the Web site of a group trying to raise awareness of the abortion rate in New York City, which has become America’s leading abortion mill.
It launched its program at a press conference in January 2011, when it announced that the abortion rate in the city in 2009 was a ghastly 41 percent. That is the percentage of all pregnancies not ended by miscarriage that were ended by abortion. In some parts of the minority community, the number was a ghastly 60 percent.
The governor has been silent on this tragedy. Yet the pro-life foundation that backs NYC41percent.com has brought together such extremists as Timothy Cardinal Dolan of the archdiocese of New York and Rabbi David Zwiebel of the Agudath Israel of America. To what state does Cuomo want them to move?
Then there is the question of assault weapons. Where are the extremists on this issue lurking? How about at The New York Times. Its ex-assistant-managing editor, Craig Whitney, has become alarmed over the fact that, although he is a law-abiding adult New Yorker, he can’t get a permit to carry a pistol.
Whitney served in the Navy and carried a .45 as an officer in Vietnam. He’s an extremist of good citizenship: He’s never been charged with even a misdemeanor. He likes to point out that he doesn’t need a license to exercise his freedom of the press rights under the First Amendment.
It just galls him that not only does he need a license to exercise his right to bear arms under the Second Amendment — but he wouldn’t be eligible for a permit, even with his clean record. He’s so irked by this that he’s written an entire book, “Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment.”
Maybe Cuomo thinks Craig Whitney should move to neighboring Vermont, which has the most liberal gun laws in America. Adults need no permit at all to carry a pistol or assault rifle. Plus, the state in 2010 had the lowest gun-homicide rate in the entire country. Talk about extreme.
Then there’s “anti-gay” extremism. This is the hardest question, because almost no one in New York thinks of himself as “anti-gay.” The real question is how to deal with people who desire, in their own lives, to obey religious laws against gay sex.
Gov. Cuomo apparently believes these people are bigots. His campaign suggested as much, after his opponent visited the Satmar Chasidim in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When Carl Paladino echoed some (but not all) of the Satmar sentiments on gay sex, Cuomo’s spokesman accused him of “stunning homophobia.”
No doubt the governor would argue that this case makes his point precisely, since Paladino’s campaign subsequently collapsed, and Cuomo won by a mile. But to where does he want the Satmar to move? And what about the rest of Orthodox Jewry, Catholics, religious Muslims and fundamentalist Christians, whose religious laws on sex are similar to the Satmar?
Do they have a place in New York? Does the governor feel that he can represent them, include them and protect their constitutional rights, even when he disagrees with them? Or will he mock them over the airwaves and speak of them as not having a place in our state?
These questions might not matter here in New York, where Cuomo won office by an overwhelming margin. But they’ll become harder to dodge when the governor steps out onto the national stage in his quest for the presidency. We are, after all, a nation of extremists.