Mayor Bloomberg ended his commencement address at Johns Hopkins University medical school yesterday with an admonition to the graduates to “Have that last 8 A.M. beer at Jimmy’s.” The most charitable explanation of the rest of the speech is that maybe His Honor chugged one too many himself. We say that having given him a good bit of favorable comment here, as recently as yesterday for his pro-immigration remarks. But his Johns Hopkins speech is an example of the mayor at his worst. In the name of public health, he managed to cast himself athwart the views of religious New Yorkers and other Americans, from fundamentalist Christians to Orthodox Jews to Muslims.

This is the speech in which he included “unintended pregnancies” in a list of ills that included AIDS and diabetes, all while boasting of his record in New York. “We have taken aim at unintended pregnancies by increasing access to high quality reproductive health care services for all our citizens. Last June, we became the first city in America to run a public campaign to raise awareness and increase access to emergency contraception,” Mr. Bloomberg said. New Yorkers have diverse opinions on abortion and the so-called morning-after abortion pill, but every one of us surely has friends who were conceived without pre-planning and went on to be grateful for their lives. And we’d bet that in the majority, even vast majority of the cases, their parents don’t regret it.

Surely people across the political spectrum can agree that either keeping the baby or having it and putting it up for adoption are options in the case of an “unintended” pregnancy. The mayor’s comments came in a speech loaded with other left-wing dogma: gun control, global warming, anti-feeding-Terri Schiavo, anti-tobacco, anti-anything other than Darwinian evolution. It’s all wrapped in the language of science but evinces a fundamentalist secularism that comes across as hostile to religious Americans. Which the mayor isn’t. And he does such a good job when he isn’t in one of these fevers. Only Wednesday, he was on Fox News talking about the need for immigration to fill jobs. “We’re not having babies fast enough,” he complained, in a moment of real wisdom. Why not embolden the parents of those “unintended” pregnancies to carry the babies to term?