NEW YORK VALUES

East Side, West side, all around the town. Give my regards to Broadway. I want to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep. The city that frowns on 16 ounce soda pop. Where musical theater casting agents advertise that white folks need not apply.

The Big Apple. Exciting. Titillating. Vibrant. New York has everything: Carnegie Hall, The Met, The Yankees, Fifth Avenue stores and Madison Avenue admen.  

New York has it all. Everything but values.

Poor Ted Cruz. How dare he insinuate that the people in New York share attitudes and norms that are unique to their city or state. After all, you can find waitresses with green hair in Dubuque, too.

New York welcomes everybody. It is spending 140 million dollars to tell the nation that New York is open for business. Tax breaks galore beckon investors who want to start or move businesses to the Empire State.

Except, of course, if you are pro life. Except, of course, if you think that marriage is the mating of a man and a woman. Except, of course, if you agree with the National Rifle Association.

Governor Cuomo hung out the “not welcome” sign about two years ago.

Conservatives who are pro-life are just not real New Yorkers, according to the Governor. “It’s just not who we are,” says he.

Suggesting, of course, that conservatives are not like us New Yorkers. They don’t think like we do. They don’t – easy now – they don’t share our values!

Is that what the Governor said? Is that a fair translation of his “They are not welcome here” speech?

Poor Ted Cruz. He wants to be President of the United States. He wants to be the President of all the people in all of the States

He wants to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep. He knows that if he can make it there, he can make it anywhere. He wants those little town blues to melt away.

Politics is a funny business. Here you have the consummate New Yorker, whose name is emblazoned on a Manhattan sky scraper, who has been married three times and sired six children, and who belatedly has come to the conclusion that abortion stills a beating human heart, stumping his home state to huge crowds and fully expecting to win the New York Republican Primary.

In spite of Governor Cuomo. In spite of New York values.

It strikes me that it is just possible that New York isn’t as monolithic as those of us who live in fly over country have been led to believe. Maybe New York values are a thin outer layer. Maybe the nearly 20 millions of people who inhabit the real estate between Staten Island and Niagara Falls

are just like the rest of us.

It might even be possible for a Republican to carry New York in November.

The Party of Abraham Lincoln, the Party that was born under a tree in Jackson Michigan in 1860, the Party that traveled the moral high road of abolition, seems to have been reborn as the Party of Pro-Life. Whatever else the hectic year of primary elections has proven, it is abundantly clear that the GOP is on the side of the unborn.

The Supreme Court usurped the legislative powers of all Fifty States in 1972 when it decided Roe v Wade. That arrogant presumption of power has led to the deepest political divide in the the United States since the abolition of slavery.

Now, somehow, the die is cast. This election year, there will be a clear, undeniable division of the major political Parties over this, the most emotional moral, and philosophical issue of the century.

The Republican Party will nominate a Pro Life candidate. The Democrats will nominate a pro abortion candidate. Finally, after forty years, the people will be heard.

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