NYC Mayor Dismisses Idea of Separating Church and State
“I respect people talking about using their faith to help people,” said the rabbi, who met Mr. Adams in June 2018 when, as Brooklyn borough president, he honored her and other L.G.B.T.Q. activists during Pride Week. “This wasn’t that.”
Rabbi Stein noted that such rhetoric was especially harmful amid numerous instances of people citing their religious faith while targeting, for instance, drag queen story hours, including in New York City.
“I don’t think that this helps,” she said.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, described herself on Tuesday afternoon as “speechless” upon hearing the mayor’s remarks.
“The mayor is entitled to his own religious beliefs or nonbeliefs, and, the N.Y.C.L.U. would defend his right to hold those beliefs,” Ms. Lieberman said. “But, as mayor, he’s bound to uphold the Constitution, which provides for separation of church and state. And the separation of church and state is essential for the mayor and everyone else in the country to be able to freely exercise their own religious or nonreligious values.”
Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, suggested that too much fuss was being made of the mayor’s remarks. The mayor was merely saying, Mr. Levy argued, that faith guides his actions.
“As the mayor said before an interfaith group comprising hundreds of representatives from a multitude of religions, you can’t remove the heart from the body,” Mr. Levy said. “The policies we make as an administration are rooted in the mayor’s belief in the creator.”
It has been a long time since New York City had an overtly religious mayor. Mr. Adams’s immediate predecessor, Bill de Blasio, considered himself an unaffiliated “spiritual” person. Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, was a secular Jew. He belonged to Temple Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue on Fifth Avenue, but rarely attended services, his spokesman said.
