Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, newly inaugurated for his third term, has repeatedly denied he has presidential ambitions, recently naming Joe Biden as his pick for 2020.
Call me skeptical, but after viewing the spectacle of his inauguration, live from Ellis Island — instead of the state capital, Albany — it’s hard to believe Cuomo is not dreaming of a future in Washington.
The choice of Ellis Island was calculated, as Cuomo sought mightily to offer himself as the great anti-Trump, especially regarding immigration, emoting that his own legal immigrant “grandparents were the people at the southern border today.” Our “federal government,” he said “demonized new immigrants and ripped babies from their mother’s arms and left them to die on America’s doorstep.”
Rather than addressing the issues specific to citizens of New York state, he held the Empire state up as a leader for all of America, claiming it was “New York’s destiny…to bring the light that leads the way through the darkness. To show the nation the way forward and upward.” (Interesting, when New Yorkers themselves are leaving the state in droves.)
How will this happen? Well, Cuomo said that within his first 100 days he would enact "the most progressive agenda this state has ever seen, period."
His list of the agenda, after “voter reform,” is “Roe v. Wade for New York,” meaning the passage of his Reproductive Health Act. Make no mistake, “reproductive health” is a euphemism for the word he never uttered once in his address: abortion (the violent act of ripping babies from their mother’s wombs).
RHA would expand New York’s already extreme abortion license to include legal late-term abortions up to the point of birth; would allow non-doctors to perform even surgical abortions, and would remove protections for a baby born alive after an abortion attempt. In addition, as Michele Sterlace-Accorsi, executive director of Feminists Choosing Life of New York, points out: “The RHA also potentially re-victimizes victims of sex trafficking and domestic violence by completely gutting abortion from New York’s penal laws. Relevant abortion related provisions in New York’s criminal statutes allow women to hold abusers accountable for the death of wanted unborn children and for coerced abortions. If the RHA act is enacted, women can no longer hold violent partners criminally accountable for killing wanted unborn children.”
Governor Cuomo boasted that New York state “ended the moral sin of slavery 35 years before the Emancipation Proclamation,” yet he rejects his own faith tradition’s condemnation of the direct killing of a child in an abortion as a grave sin. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, has called Cuomo’s RHA a “morbidly expanded” version of “the most radical abortion license in the country," in his Wall Street Journal editorial, "The Democrats Abandon Catholics."
While Cuomo attempts to portray himself as a great unifier, someone who will heal hate and division, he demonizes those who disagree with him, as he made clear when he stated “these extreme conservatives” including those who are right-to-life “have no place in the state of New York” and later called those who oppose abortion part of a “extreme conservative, divisive cancer.”
For the sake of all that is good and decent in America, let us hope and pray that Governor Cuomo stays out of the presidential race. Rather than representing the views of most Americans — only 13 percent of whom support legal abortion in the third trimester — he panders to radical abortion activists and the hugely profitable abortion industry, declaring a dark war on the promise of motherhood.
Maria McFadden Maffucci is the editor of the Human Life Review, www.humanlifereview.com, a quarterly journal devoted to the defense of human life, founded in 1974 by her father, James P. McFadden, Associate Publisher of National Review. She is President of the Human Life Foundation, based in midtown Manhattan, which publishes the Review and supports pregnancy resource centers. Mrs. Maffucci’s articles and editorials have appeared in the Human Life Review, First Things, National Review Online, National Review, Verily, and Crux. A Holy Cross graduate with a BA in Philosophy, she is married to Robert E. Maffucci, and the mother of three children. Her interests include exploring opportunities for individuals with special needs. To read more of her reports — Click Here Now.