Orthodox Jews and Catholic Priests Sue Cuomo and de Blasio Over Double Standard on Protests and Worship
“The governor and his agents, along with New York City’s mayor have employed favoritism and political platforms against people of faith”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio have taken a hard line on people gathering for religious purposes while cheering on protests for the last two weeks. Some people have had it with the double standard.
Now a coalition of Catholic priests and Orthodox Jews has launched a lawsuit.
Lee Brown and Tamar Lapin report at the New York Post:
De Blasio, Cuomo sued by priests, Orthodox Jews for banning service
Two Catholic priests and a trio of Orthodox Jews are suing Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo — accusing them of an “unprecedented abuse of power” in shuttering houses of worship while supporting mass protests.
Upstate priests Rev. Steven Soos and Rev. Nicholas Stamos and Brooklyn Jewish congregants Elchanan Perr, Daniel Schonborn and Mayer Mayerfeld filed a federal lawsuit last week arguing New York’s leaders “exploited the COVID-19 pandemic” to create “a veritable dictatorship” with their lockdown rules.
“These orders, both the emergency stay-home and reopening plan declarations, clearly discriminate against houses of worship,” their attorney, Christopher Ferrara, said in a statement. “They are illegally content-based, elaborate, arbitrary and pseudo-scientific.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James is also named in the suit for helping to enforce the rules, which the lawsuit says have been “exposed as a sham.”
Mary Margaret Olohan of the Daily Caller has more on this:
“It is time to end New York’s experiment in absolute monarchy,” said Thomas More Society Special Counsel Christopher Ferrara in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are asking the court to put an end to these unconstitutional executive orders and their prejudicial enforcement.”
The Thomas More Society’s complaint lists a number of alleged abuses of power, accusing the defendants of exploiting the pandemic to create “a veritable dictatorship” through Cuomo’s executive orders, of selectively enforcing social distancing through fines and punishments, and more.
The lawsuit accuses Cuomo, de Blasio, and James of infringing on freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, expressive association, and due process, according to a press release from the Thomas More Society, and Senior Judge Gary L. Sharpe has ordered the defendants to file a response by noon on June 15…
“The governor and his agents, along with New York City’s mayor have employed favoritism and political platforms against people of faith,” Ferrara added. “Why is a large worship gathering deemed more dangerous than a mass protest, full of shouting, arm-waving people in close proximity to one another?”
Two days ago, there was a massive protest in Brooklyn for Black Trans Lives Matter:
The #BlackTransLivesMatter protest in Brooklyn right now is stunning. pic.twitter.com/glDticAc4o
— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) June 14, 2020
Yesterday, the gates of a park in a Jewish neighborhood were welded shut:
Bill de Blasio is responding to the mass protest in Brooklyn yesterday by welding the gates shut at the biggest park in the Jewish community of Borough Park, Brooklyn.
What does @NYCMayor have against the Jewish community?https://t.co/sctXAbPiqL
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 15, 2020
Members of the community responded with a bolt cutter:
The park lock cut open with a bolt-cutter. pic.twitter.com/UZTFrQbQyg
— NYC Scanner (@NYScanner) June 15, 2020
People of faith should just reopen their houses of worship and dare the authorities to shut them down.
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Comments
Not smart to piss off the NY Jews
A lot of Berlin Jews said that in the 1930s.
Di blasio is a madman – literally. He is very dangerous.
“People of faith should just reopen their houses of worship and dare the authorities to shut them down.”
Not just people of faith. Everyone should give these little tyrants the finger and get back to their lives.
As said elsewhere on the Wdb, at least the Jews aren’t throwing Mazel Tov cocktails.
Cuomo adopted the Pro-Choice religion, where bigotry is a matter of principle.
While having filed the suit in Federal court means that there is some small chance of getting a ruling based on the Constitution not possible in a New York state court, it will not be timely in any fashion.
Subotai Bahadur
Can’t we just get a federal judge in Alaska to issue a nationwide injunction against this?
Sadly, you need a Hawaiian judge, and those judges always rule for the Left.
Why not just pass the plate and slip Enema Sullivan a few bucks – or get access to the Epstein photos of John Roberts getting his jollies with a teenager?
It really is amazing how hypocritical Cuomo and De Blasio are on this issue.
I thank God every day for the internet. Because even though a lot of the internet is pure crap there is enough good stuff out there to show the truth to the people around the country.
The left can’t hide their actions anymore.
“I thank God every day for the internet.”
You should be thanking Al Gore. He invented the Internet. How quickly people forget!
The Orthodox Jews look funny with their facial hair and old-fashioned clothes, and generally pudgy builds or 98 pound weakling builds. Meir Kahane of Blessed Memory is no longer around! They are not going to riot. And the newspapers are not going to go crazy in their favor. So the Mayor can disrespect them and treat them badly. There is no political fallout.
Unlike the BLM mobs.
This is why POTUS will win re-election, by a comfortable margin, in my opinion, if not a relative landslide — because there are sufficient numbers of Americans who are more than aware of, and, are appalled by, the Dhimmi-crats’ lockdown totalitarianism hypocrisy, combined with the Dhimmi-crats’ contemptible and indefensible cheerleading/beatification of looters, vandals, jackbooted, brownshirted Leftist thugs, etc. This is not a recipe for winning over independents, working-class voters and families who want to live lives in peace and security.
But the mainstream Jews — secular liberals who still think the Dems are the JFK Dems — will still vote D, no matter what Deblasio and Cuomo do.
Tar and feather all Demoncrat politicians with massive discrimination lawsuits nationwide. Make them feel the high costs of lawsuits! Then sue them in civil court.
“People of faith should just reopen their houses of worship and dare the authorities to shut them down.”
Yup. And tell DeBlasio and Cuomo, “Bite my shiny metal ass.”
The synagogue I attend on weekdays has basically stopped paying any attention to the regulations. They’re letting in as many as show up, hardly anyone wears a mask, and if people spread out it’s only because not all the regulars are back (though most are).
The one I attend on Friday nights and Saturdays is still paying attention to the rules, albeit bending them. Officially we’re only allowed exactly ten but we generally get a few more than that (this Saturday morning I counted 15), and everyone wears masks.
The playground thing is not antisemitic. It’s stupid, but it has nothing to do with Jews as such. All NYC playgrounds are closed. Parks are open, but playgrounds are not. Many people in the community seem not to understand this distinction, and complain that parks in other neighborhoods are open while our parks are closed, but that’s just not true. The places they’re complaining about are not parks, they’re stand-alone playgrounds.
Now why playgrounds should be closed is a different question. They were originally closed because the virus was believed to persist on playground equipment, which was not being cleaned. Since the CDC now says the virus doesn’t persist on surfaces this should no longer be a factor. Also kids congregating together was thought to be a major problem because they’d all infect each other and then bring it back home and infect their families and grandparents. But now we’re told that kids don’t seem to infect others very much. Above all, it’s just perverse to claim that 10,000 people packing together to protest whatever can be tolerated, but kids having innocent fun on the swings and slides cannot.
And our community needs the playgrounds more than most, because we have large families and mostly live in small apartments, and also because most people in our community don’t believe in TV, are uncomfortable with parking the kids in front of a video no matter how appropriate the content, and are even more uncomfortable letting them spend too much time on video games, so we depend on the playgrounds to let them run around and use up their energy. So people have been breaking the locks on playgrounds and letting the kids trespass.
The welding thing happened because the police didn’t have time to keep coming back to this playground and clearing it and replacing the locks, so they did a temporary weld, which would have been removed when the cops stopped being so busy. No antisemitism involved, just stupidity.
It would seem a portable grinder and a couple of spare grinder wheels would take care of any welds, wouldn’t it? Same for locks and chains.
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Sonny Cuomo has already stated that he will not follow any court orders. That his emergency powers override any court decisions against him. Even if you win in court who will enforce the ruling?