Like father, like son — usually. So if you’re trying to figure out almost anything about Gov. Andrew Cuomo, it helps to examine how his late father, Mario Cuomo, dealt with similar issues.
Their relationship, while complicated in all the usual ways, was made infinitely more so by competing careers. Mario served three terms as governor, and Andrew is now in his third term.
It was practically inevitable, then, that the son would have a conflict with the Roman Catholic Church and, like the father, face calls for excommunication over support for abortion rights.
Just as Andrew is taking heat from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Mario ran into the buzz saw of the late John J. O’Connor, then archbishop and later cardinal.
O’Connor had not been in New York long when he said at a 1984 press conference, “I do not see how a Catholic, in good conscience, can vote for an individual expressing himself or herself as favoring abortion.”
Mario responded by blasting O’Connor, saying he had crossed a line by trying to dictate which candidates were acceptable to the church.
“So I’m a Catholic governor,” Cuomo told Newsday. “I’m going to make you all Catholics — no birth control, you have to go to church on Sunday, no abortion.”
Soon after, he gave a speech at Notre Dame where he famously drew a line between his private views and public duties in a pluralistic nation.
“I accept the church’s teaching on abortion,” he said, before adding, “Must I insist you do?”
George Marlin, in an excellent summary of the dispute five years ago, credited it with having a “profound impact on the abortion debate.”
Indeed, 1984 was just 11 years after the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, and it was a very different time in the Democratic Party. Many of its leaders and voters either opposed abortion or favored serious restrictions, and President Bill Clinton later tapped into that reservoir by saying that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
Dolan used Clinton’s phrase in his Tuesday Post opinion piece as a way of contrasting those Dems with today’s. Dolan went on to shred Andrew Cuomo for signing the new state law that eliminates nearly all restrictions on abortion by removing it from the criminal code — then celebrating it by having the spire of the Freedom Tower lit in pink.
“Ghoulish,” the cardinal called the law, and accused Cuomo of insulting the church over its position on a new sex-abuse law involving minors and said, “Democrats had chosen to alienate faithful Catholic voters.”
Mario Cuomo’s dispute with O’Connor went on for years, and although there was much talk of excommunication, it never happened. I believe Mario would have been heartbroken if he had been forced from the church, and it would have hurt him politically in those days.
Dolan likewise is rebuffing widespread calls to excommunicate Andrew, saying, “It is not an appropriate response.” Still, he said about Andrew on Fox News, “He likes this. He likes being the … bad boy when it comes to the Catholic Church.”
I assume Andrew is also relieved that excommunication is not likely, although it’s possible these days that being booted from the church would be a political advantage, especially as he positions himself for a possible 2020 presidential run.
After all, the new Democratic Party is the one where delegates at the 2012 convention booed a mention of God!
It is a party that is secular to the extreme, with nary a peep of protest when ObamaCare forced nuns to subsidize birth control and when leftists try to force bakers to effectively participate in gay-marriage events against their churches’ teaching.
More recently, the hostility among Dem senators toward Brett Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court hearings often came with an anti-Catholic bent, as have attacks on other conservative judicial nominees.
And there is little doubt that the left’s piling on of the Covington, Ky., kids had as much to do with their being Catholic students who attended the March for Life rally as it did their pro-Trump hats.
In fact, being a white, pro-life Catholic who supports Trump is now grounds for abuse and even hate from many on the political left, including those in the media. Again, not a single leader, including Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or Andrew Cuomo, dares to blow the whistle on the naked prejudice.
The trend is pronounced enough that it is fair to ask whether the party that nominated Al Smith and John F. Kennedy will always have room for Catholics who do not meet the party’s litmus test on abortion. Party leader Tom Perez even said in 2017 it would not support any candidates at any level who do not support abortion.
In that sense, at least, Cuomo is still viable. In America as a whole, New York’s new abortion law is way outside the mainstream, but among activists, donors and the surging secular, socialist wing of the party, the more extreme, the better.
That trend is exacerbated by the President Trump factor. Cuomo often justifies his policies as a defense against the “assault” on New York by the administration, and the abortion law fits that approach.
Against the backdrop of the left’s efforts to gin up votes and dollars with nonstop warnings that Roe is in jeopardy, Cuomo’s statement about the law makes the point. He said, “With the signing of this bill, we are sending a clear message that whatever happens in Washington, women in New York will always have the fundamental right to control their own body.”
No right is absolute — except, apparently, when it comes to abortion in New York, where “always” is the rule.
Blas’ bull
The Putz has chutzpah.
The fact that he presides over the biggest slum in New York — the Housing Authority — has not dimmed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fervor for grandstanding about bad private landlords. In fact, harping on their failures to get the lead paint out helps take the heat off his failures — he hopes.
His newest “vision,” as he called it, requires all landlords, including those with as few as a single apartment, to conduct lead-paint inspections.
If landlords fake the inspections — as the city did under de Blasio — they will have hell to pay. Take that, little people.
It’s good to be king. And even better to have no shame.
Earbuddies on a train
Reader Ruth Cohen sees a modern good deed on the 1 train.
She writes:
“A man and a woman sit beside each other. They are strangers. He has ear buds and she has ear phones. Both are texting. She has a cough. He reaches into his jacket and takes out a plastic bag with cough drops. He hands her one and takes one himself. She says, ‘Thank you,’ never looks up and both continue thumbing away.”
Apple’s sauce
Headline: Apple now has $245 billion cash on hand.
Somebody could build a lot of border walls with that.