Bloomberg at Cooper Union

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Mayor Bloomberg tried, in his speech yesterday at Cooper Union, to distance himself from the bigotry against religion that has infected the struggle for same gender marriage. “I have enormous respect for religious leaders on both sides of the issue,” he said, before asserting that “government has no business taking sides in these debates – none.” But elsewhere in his speech he suggested that “the question for every New York State lawmaker” is “Do you want to be remembered as a leader on civil rights?” Then he suggested that history has not remembered obstructionists kindly — “not on abolition,” he said. “ . . . not on civil rights.” And, he said, “it will be no different on marriage rights.”

So which is it? Does the mayor really have enormous respect for religious leaders who hold with orthodox teachings? Or does he regard them as he regards defenders of the evil of slavery or as he regards opponents of the civil rights movement? At Cooper Union he echoed the stance of Governor Cuomo, who during the recent campaign set down as bigotry the concerns that Carl Paladino had expressed following his meeting with the Satmar chasidim in Williamsburg. The mayor echoed the line of reasoning of Judge Doris Ling-Cohan, who, in 2005, sought to establish same gender marriage in New York by judicial fiat. In ruling that the constitution of New York state required the recognition of gay marriages, she likened opposition to gay marriage to the odious anti-miscegenation laws.

In the event, Judge Ling-Cohan’s line of reasoning was found, by no less an authority than the highest court in New York, to have been erroneous. The Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 that state’s constitution does not require the recognition of same gender marriage but rather that the question was one for the legislature. The court’s opinion, by Justice Robert Smith, pointedly rebuffed any suggestion that religious teachings are bigoted. “The idea that same-sex marriage is even possible is a relatively new one,” he wrote. “Until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex. A court should not lightly conclude that everyone who held this belief was irrational, ignorant or bigoted. We do not so conclude.”

It is a tragedy that the mayor crossed that line. Orthodox religious leaders oppose same gender marriage as a matter of religious law. Yet some religious leaders agree with the mayor that marriage is a civil matter. Others believe the state should get out of the marriage business altogether and leave it entirely to private religious or secular contracts. No matter which, there was no need for the mayor to mock religion and liken its orthodox adherents — Christian, Muslim, and Jewish — to those who opposed the abolition of slavery.

It’s hard to predict how the marriage question will prosper in the Senate in Albany. But it’s not hard to imagine that the dressing down that the mayor delivered at Cooper Union will only harden opposition among those who are unwilling to label as bigots those who believe in a traditional interpretation of the laws brought down from Sinai. This is a point these columns have made before. We, too, have friends, relatives, or colleagues who are in same gender relationships. We welcome them into our social lives, our families, and our places of work. But we also have friends who adhere to orthodox views and we look up to the religious sages. What kind of advance would it be for our, or any, society if the rights of the former were advanced by denigrating the latter?


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