Gay Ruling Shows New
York Is Less Liberal
Than It (and the
U.S.) Thinks
By SAM ROBERTS,
NYTimes on the Web, July 10, 2006
New York City -- Sin City
bills itself as a New York "upscale cabaret club." Don't look for it in
Times Square, or even in Manhattan. It has a Park Avenue address, but in
the South Bronx. And when it chooses to promote itself, it describes
itself as a "Las Vegas-style cabaret."
You can still have a good time in New York, of course, but it's no longer
synonymous with a term like sin city, the characterization it deserved and
shared at times with, among other dens of unbounded bawdiness, Las Vegas,
Tangiers, and, yes, upstate Utica.
These days, you can't smoke in New York bars or restaurants. You
practically have to forage for pornography, even in Times Square. Local
tourist guides point out the Museum of Sex, a far cry from the prostitute-lined
strip that drew out-of-town visitors to Eighth Avenue more than a generation
ago.
Last year, an outcry from churchgoers led the City Council to repeal a "worship
tax," so now you can now spend Sunday in church without having to feed parking
meters. Only last month, the state ended one of the last remaining
elements of the blue laws restricting alcohol sales on Sundays.
Perhaps most telling of all, the state's highest court ruled last week that gay
couples cannot legally marry, and explained its decision by suggesting that
heterosexual parents might be better suited to child rearing.
Banning gay marriage is one thing in Georgia, and judges there did just that the
very same day. But in New York? This supposed bastion of liberalism,
the birthplace of the American Communist Party, the N.A.A.C.P. and the gay
rights movement? A city whose most Republican Manhattan neighborhood was
once described by William F. Buckley Jr. (who founded National Review in New
York) as "the densest national concentration of vegetarians, pacifists,
hermaphrodites, junkies, Communists, Randites, clam-juice-and-betel-nut eaters"?
"We're not a police state," said Myron Magnet, a prominent New York conservative
editor, "but it's not the asylum, either."
New York is undoubtedly more liberal, or more tolerant, than many other places.
But even in New York City, according a New York Times poll last year, only 35
percent of those surveyed favored gay marriage (the figure is 32 percent
statewide and 23 percent nationally). The latest city voter registration
figures show more New Yorkers enrolled in the Conservative Party than in the
Liberal.
The city will have been governed by a Republican mayor for at least 16 years
(though former Mayor Edward I. Koch, a Democrat, says that the incumbent,
Michael R. Bloomberg, "is as Republican as I am"), and the state has been
governed by a Republican for the last 12.
New York may allow prison inmates and first cousins to wed, but the court
concluded that legalizing marriage only between people of the opposite sex was
rational and constitutional. In a victory against judicial activism, the
judges left the issue to the Legislature, thereby also injecting it into the
governor's campaign between John Faso, the Republican, and Eliot Spitzer, the
Democrat leading in the polls. Mr. Spitzer said he would propose
legislation to legalize gay marriage.
"It changes the dynamic of the race," said Mr. Magnet, who edits the Manhattan
Institute's City Journal. "The voters get a choice between a tax cutter
and defender of traditional marriage against a proponent of big government and
gay marriage. The conventional wisdom is, a Republican can win on tax and
spending issues, but New York, the state, is so culturally liberal that you need
to triangulate.
"I think we're now going to put that to the test," he said.
While a statewide gay rights bill was introduced in 1971, it languished in the
Legislature for 31 years until it passed.
"There's no question that the people of the city and state of New York are
middle class in their thoughts, in their traditions, to a far greater degree
than people give them credit for," Mr. Koch said in a weekend interview.
"You mean the place that gave us the Rockefeller drug laws?" said Mike Wallace,
a City University historian. "No, I don't think we're as liberal as we
like to think we are."
The Democrats last controlled both houses of the State Legislature in 1965.
As recently as 1992, the city's Board of Education ousted the schools chancellor
after crippling confrontations over social issues like condom distribution, an
AIDS curriculum, and teaching students in early grades to respect gays and
lesbians.
"If you're saying that when it comes to religion, New York is hedonist, immoral,
the old 42nd Street where you can get pornography, all of those old images, the
wild crazy morality-free city of New York, that's all nonsense," said Mario M.
Cuomo, a former Democratic governor. Rather, he said, it was religion and
such common social propositions that people love one another and come together
to make the world better that helped shape the state's compassionate social
welfare tradition.
Ariela Keysar of Trinity College in Hartford, co-author with Barry A. Kosmin of
"Religion in a Free Market," suggested that New Yorkers were not much more
secular than other Americans. According to the American Religious
Identification Survey, she said, two-thirds of New Yorkers regard themselves as
religious or somewhat religious, compared to three-quarters nationwide.
Kieran Mahoney, a Republican political consultant, suggested that while "New
York is well to the left of the country on all the indices of tolerance, the
social agendas of both the left and the right are suspect in the center in New
York."
When the presidential election results are parsed, New York, like much of the
nation, is more a purple state than a bright red or blue one.
"The 'red staters' in New York constitute more than 40 percent of the
population," said Robert S. McElvaine, a history professor at Millsaps College.
"Even in California, which has replaced New York as the state that so-called
conservatives most love to hate, one can find new 'Get U.S. out of U.N.'
billboards in the Central Valley. And in my state of Mississippi,
certainly among the reddest, nearly 40 percent of us vote and think 'blue,' a
fact which does not square with the equally warped image that many New Yorkers
and others around the nation have of Mississippi."
John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, recalled that New York's proportion
of Catholics was among the highest of any state's, and that many still tended to
be more conservative than the general population.
Moreover, he said, "The coalition between the lunch-bucket liberals —
working-class people who want health care, protection of unions and working
conditions, etc. — and the lifestyle liberals — people with nontraditional
lifestyles and all hues of identity politics — has never been completely
comfortable in New York State, but they have learned to live with each other as
a condition of forming a durable majority, at least in New York City."
The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, drew a
distinction between everyday "live-and-let-live" tolerance and enacting
legislation. "The black community is much more conservative than people
think it is, and so are large segments of the Orthodox Jewish community," he
said. "Some of Giuliani's policies were very conservative and people
embraced them."
Russell Shorto, whose book, "The Island at the Center of the World," traced New
York's tradition of tolerance to its Dutch origins, said gay marriage was an
issue that "confounds the liberal/conservative dichotomy."
"One could take a liberal stance of supporting all rights of gay couples with
regard to family and childrearing, but still consider that 'marriage' means a
man and a woman," he said.
Andrew Hacker, the Queens College political scientist, said the evolution from
sin city to prim city does not necessarily suggest a conservative drift.
Smoking bans are a priority of "mainly left-ish health police," he said, and
restricting pornography shops and theaters is a goal of "the more aesthetically
inclined of all persuasions" — the same people who object to a McDonald's in
their neighborhood.
Christopher Buckley, the author and editor, said New York had hardly
metamorphosed into a bastion of conservatism just because the court rejected gay
marriage or because the authorities have cracked down on rowdy sports fans and
car alarms and subway riders who place their feet on a seat.
After all, he recalled, this is the city where he was handing out "Buckley for
Mayor" bumper stickers during the 1965 campaign of his father, William F.
Buckley Jr., when a 13-year-old girl sweetly asked for all of them. "She
tore them to pieces, stuck her tongue out and me and sneered, 'I HATE Buckley!'
" he wrote in The Times two years ago. "This childhood trauma (which left
me with a permanent twitch) took place in the Upper East Side, the only
nominally Republican part of Manhattan."
In a weekend interview, he said, he was skeptical about how much has changed.
"The key will be how many people start arriving at Lincoln Center in pickups
with gun racks," he said.
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