Letter to the Editor: Weisenberg, Skelos Backslap After Gay Marriage Vote

To the Editor:

The Sen. Dean Skelos and Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg dog and pony show performed a damaging pas de deux last week with the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York.

In the case of Weisenberg, I did not expect much. Harvey is a crusty ideological partisan of an already-radical assembly agenda. He voted "yea" with fist-pumping élan. But in the case of Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, his actions in the gay-nuptials vote shocked his conservative Republican core constituency by allowing the vote to hit the floor and by not holding together their caucus. More was expected of Skelos.

Skelos could have kept the bill off the Senate floor, as he did the very same week with state health insurance proposals. Skelos was either not as politically powerful as he thinks, or he engaged in duplicitous political horse-trading. He was either naïve or evasive when he referred to legalized gay marriage as merely “a step above civil unions.” 

He was either shortsighted or complicit in not calculating the inordinate national impact of New York State’s move, a juggernaut immediately suggested by a crowing Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Whether Skelos acted in ignorance or complicity, he should be held accountable.

Dean and Harvey’s backslapping to guarantee “mutually-assured election” is well-known shtick in their overlapping legislative districts. Now it appears that their chummy photo-ops have graduated to a confounding hegemony of ideology and political utility. On top of their common legacy of giving us suffocating taxes and legislative dysfunction, they now, in their own way, give us a dubious milestone in questionable social engineering.

Alas, there’s no difference between the two old political warhorses. The Dean and Harvey dog and pony show. The horse finally has its other end.