Topic: politics
Under former county executive Jack Doyle - to whom Al Franken’s epithet for Rush Limbaugh, “big fat idiot,” so precisely applies – Rochesterians got almost weekly reminders of how vicious and ignorant the local Republican ruling clique can be.
Then came Maggie Brooks, whose stage presence, honed by years as a TV “personality,” put a human face on the GOP machine. But every once in a while, the velvet glove slips off the raised iron fist.
And so it was late this week, when Brooks said the county would appeal a recent decision by a state Appellate Court (one step below the highest state court, the Court of Appeals) in favor of marriage rights for two local women, one of whom is a Monroe Community College employee. The Appellate Court decided that this couple’s marriage, performed a few years ago in the province of Ontario, Canada, where same-sex marriages are legal, must be recognized in New York State.
The legal principle is straightforward: New York has long recognized legal marriages from other states and countries that use different criteria from those obtaining here.
Brooks has couched her appeal, or at least her advance PR, in “moderate” language. In effect, she pleads she’s only doing the right thing – preserving the commonly understood definition of marriage and the sanctity of the law - not harming anyone or sowing hatred and division. But oh yeah, there are financial considerations: she hints that Monroe County can’t afford to give marriage-related benefits to the hordes of sodomites on the county payroll who will now demand them.
The county exec always adopts a pleading tone when she does this kind of damage. Take her insistent claims that her “FAIR” tax-shifting scheme was so, so equitable – and wouldn’t take candy from babies. In that case, of course, she just ignored the numbers, as she has right from the beginning of her years at 39 West Main Street. (Remember how she ran for county exec the first time on a plan that would cut taxes yet not gut any popular programs? That was a most painful exercise in the new conservative math.)
Nobody will ever call Brooks a big, fat anything. No, she’s more subtly dangerous than the Limbaughs of the world, mostly because she gets things done for the Limbaughs behind the scenes – like Steve Minarik, who by the way is married to Judge (!) Renee Forgensi Minarik, who ran for Congress against Louise Slaughter on the (hold your breath, or nose) Contract With America.
You might therefore say Brooks is just working on contract now: imposing the moral vision of the neo-Reaganites on us at the local rather than the federal level.
And it’s all perfectly legal! So far.
Let's hope the Court of Appeals sees the light and does the right thing.
