We announced that gatherings with more than five hundred attendees must be canceled or postponed. As part of that, we shut down Broadway theaters. Initially, the theaters wanted to operate at half capacity, but they soon capitulated to our full closure, in part because that way they’d be entitled to insurance money, which would save them from bankruptcy.
When we announced that the St. Patrick’s Day Parade would be postponed, a reporter from the New York Post complained, “There are a lot of people who love the parade.” She was right: New York loves parades. Almost every group has its own parade. We have the Celebrate Israel Parade, the Greek Parade, the Columbus Day Parade, the West Indian Day Parade, the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, the African American Day Parade, the Pride March. The parades are a symbol of our diversity and a sign of respect for every member of our New York family. The St. Patrick’s Day Parade is one of the oldest and largest parades. Not only is it a tribute to the Irish community, but it is also a favorite of the Catholic Church. I am Catholic but have had my issues with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. I support a woman’s right to choose and marriage equality. The Catholic Church is vehemently opposed to both. New York was the first big state to pass marriage equality legislation that allowed same-sex couples to marry, and the Church never forgave me. It didn’t really matter that the Supreme Court of the United States went on to find prohibition against same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional; the Church still didn’t let me forget. I remember attending a service with my daughters at a church in Mount Kisco the Sunday after passing that law. The priest gave a homily about how reprehensible marriage equality was. We got up and left in the middle of the service. This was after we’d had to leave our previous church because the congregation gave the priest a hard time for letting me attend services there because I was divorced. I also had refused to get an annulment that would have made my children illegitimate. I had also advocated for and signed the Child Victims Act into law, allowing people who were sexually assaulted by a member of the clergy to sue for damages. This law had significant financial ramifications for the Catholic Church.
My father also supported a woman’s right to choose, and at the time the Catholic Church threatened my father with excommunication. My father was raised on the old Baltimore Catechism; by those rules, if you were excommunicated, you could not get into heaven. Purgatory was the best you could hope for. But then the Church eliminated purgatory as a concept, and now you had a real conundrum. It hurt my father deeply, and he gave a famous speech at the University of Notre Dame explaining how he reconciled his Catholic faith with his public duty as governor. But these were old and deep wounds.
The tension with the Church was personally painful to me as well. As a former altar boy raised in Catholic schools, I will say that their displeasure still resonates to this day. Postponing the St. Patrick’s Day Parade was going to make a bad situation worse, I feared.
In retrospect, shutting down the parade was an obvious move to make, but at the time, when all of this was still new and unfolding, the critics were loud and had a lot of support. St. Patrick’s Day is a high holy day in New York. However, the history and facts were undeniable. In the 1918 flu pandemic, Philadelphia allowed a parade in support of Liberty Bonds for World War I, which increased the spread of the virus exponentially. Even during these early days of the coronavirus, we had seen that allowing large celebrations to go on in other states resulted in long-term damage and even death. New Orleans had allowed Mardi Gras celebrations to go forward in late February, an “epidemiologist’s nightmare,” as The New York Times put it.
At this point the federal government hadn’t even put forth national guidelines to establish which activities were safe and which should be prohibited, leaving decisions to state and local governments. This has its downsides. Local politicians are focused on their smaller, regional constituencies, which means making decisions that offend the local community is not easy. National guidance can be helpful. Also, when I get to the pearly gates, I don’t believe postponing the St. Patrick’s Day Parade will be at the top of the list of reasons why I am denied admission. At the end of the day, the hard decision was the right decision, and the history books will make the ultimate determination.
The St. Patrick’s Day Parade highlighted an ongoing major tension in taking action. I wanted to be aggressive in combating the virus, but we could not get ahead of the degree of public acceptance and compliance. If the public refused to follow an executive order, it would all be over. They would then disregard all the difficult executive orders, and we would be powerless to enforce compliance. I needed to bring the public along with me. If we canceled the St. Patrick’s Day Parade but people showed up anyway, it would signal a major problem. Fortunately, the officials involved in the parade were all too willing to support my decision as long as I went first and took the heat.
MARCH 13 | 102 NEW CASES | 50 HOSPITALIZED | 0 DEATHS
“At times of crisis you tend to see what people are really made of.”
WE DID THE MORNING BRIEFING
