MEANWHILE Whatever Your Religion, Park It in New York
Gail Collins The New York Times
Wednesday, March 7, 2001
NEW YORK The Bush administration's program to direct more federal funds to church-run social welfare programs seemed like a good idea for at least five minutes. But now it is taking fire from all sides - Christian conservatives, libertarians and some mainline Catholic and Jewish organizations that are comfortable with the rules the way they are.
This should not surprise anyone. Those of us who live in New York can tell you how many problems arise when church and state start drifting together. This is the place where parking regulations turn into "faith-based initiatives."
If we had not all been on Big Storm Alert on Monday, the New York City government would have been celebrating Eid al Adha, the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice, by suspending alternate side of the street parking rules.
We do this sort of thing all the time. Pat Robertson may be worried that the Bush administration will wind up giving money to the Church of Scientology or Reverend Moon, but as far as parking-space-deprived New Yorkers are concerned, there is no such thing as an illegitimate religious holiday.
When politics and religion start to mix, everybody wants a piece of the action. The city began suspending its parking laws for matters of faith around 1950, when the Department of Sanitation bought its first mechanical brooms and announced that drivers were going to have to move their cars every morning to make way for them.
Observant Jews requested an exemption for holy days on which they were forbidden to drive. Nobody else had similar issues of faith, but that didn't quell the desire for equal treatment. Catholics got a bunch of feasts on the Sanitation Department parking calendar, and New York became the only place in the world where people of all creeds were keenly aware of the exact dates of the Feast of the Assumption and Simhat Torah.
The Muslims started demanding recognition 20 years ago, and ran into some rather fierce resistance from the Sanitation high command, which had begun to realize that every day of the week in New York City was undoubtedly a holy day for somebody. But the Islamic community lucked out in 1992 when Noach Dear, an Orthodox Jew, was appointed chairman of the City Council Transportation Committee. Mr. Dear discovered that the story of a Jewish politician who helped Muslims was a headline-maker not only in America but in the Israeli press as well.
Before you knew it, the first three days of Eid al Adha and Eid al Fitr were included in the mix.
"One-day parking suspension is a token," Mr. Dear said firmly. "I don't like this token stuff. If we're going to respect religion, we're going to respect religion."
This was a near perfect articulation of the New York political theory that the way to honor the dignity of faith is by passing special interest legislation for every religion in sight.
Currently, the administration of Governor George Pataki is attempting to respect religion by making yet another trek to the Supreme Court on behalf of Kiryas Joel, a community of Hasidic Jews who want their own separate public school district. This is the fourth time the legislature has tried to pass a law to accommodate Kiryas Joel, a community that has won the hearts of lawmakers by voting as a bloc for whichever candidate its leaders recommend.
Catholic leaders are due up in Albany, the state capital, next week to lobby for a legislative agenda that includes giving church-run institutions an exemption from a bill requiring health insurance policies to cover birth control pills. Conservative lawmakers, none of whom pay the least bit of attention when the church leaders show up with their welfare proposals, expressed confidence their intervention would tip the balance on birth control.
Meanwhile, Mayor Rudy Giuliani is continuing to work on forming a Decency Commission to vet museum exhibits for art that offends organized religion. For a while, this was New York City's biggest religious controversy. But frankly, the sight of Mr. Giuliani in fishnet tights and heels dancing with the Rockettes last weekend has driven this one completely out of our minds.
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