Posted on 07/11/2006 10:10:54 PM PDT by neverdem
Sin City bills itself as a New York "upscale cabaret club." Don't look for it in Times Square, or even in Manhattan. It has a Park Avenue address, but in the South Bronx. And when it chooses to promote itself, it describes itself as a "Las Vegas-style cabaret."
You can still have a good time in New York, of course, but it's no longer synonymous with a term like sin city, the characterization it deserved and shared at times with, among other dens of unbounded bawdiness, Las Vegas, Tangiers, and, yes, upstate Utica.
These days, you can't smoke in New York bars or restaurants. You practically have to forage for pornography, even in Times Square. Local tourist guides point out the Museum of Sex, a far cry from the prostitute-lined strip that drew out-of-town visitors to Eighth Avenue more than a generation ago.
Last year, an outcry from churchgoers led the City Council to repeal a "worship tax," so now you can now spend Sunday in church without having to feed parking meters. Only last month, the state ended one of the last remaining elements of the blue laws restricting alcohol sales on Sundays.
Perhaps most telling of all, the state's highest court ruled last week that gay couples cannot legally marry, and explained its decision by suggesting that heterosexual parents might be better suited to child rearing.
Banning gay marriage is...
--snip--
"It changes the dynamic of the race," said Mr. Magnet, who edits the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. "The voters get a choice between a tax cutter and defender of traditional marriage against a proponent of big government and gay marriage. The conventional wisdom is, a Republican can win on tax and spending issues, but New York, the state, is so culturally liberal that you need to triangulate.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It doesn't necessarily mean that New York is less liberal than the US thinks; it just means that their judicial system is more conservative than the US thinks the people of New York are.
All of the smokers who swung vote have had a real taste of tyranny. They understand what it is like to be under an oppressive liberal regime. Maybee they have had enough.
OK, show me how well the New York Supremes follow the US constitution when my Driver's License is legal for use in that state, but not my pistol permit.
I guess we should be happy for any ray of hope from the region,
B.S.
As a Southern Reagan conservative that has been in N.Y. several hundred times I say N.Y. is a liberal magnet.
The law is the law, and the idiocy of liberalism is that it expands and creates law where there is no will of the legislature expressed.
IMO, one ruling by a sane judge in NY does NOT make it a Red state!!!
I think a comfortable majority of New Yorkers would vote against gay "marriage" on a referendum. The problem in some states, such as New York and California, is that there is a large block of welfare voters, immigrants, etc., who vote for liberal candidates because those candidates provide them with bigger welfare checks, access to free medical care, and so on. These voters are just as strongly against gay "marriage" as anyone else, but that issue gets trumped on election day by the freebie handouts issue.
That's why California voters rejected gay "marriage" by a wide margin (over 60% against) on a referendum, but then voted in a state legislature that supports gay "marriage". Many of those legislators got elected in minority and immigrant districts where gay "marriage" is very unpopular, and lost badly on the referendum, but as long as the Democrat candidate brings plenty of welfare payments and other goodies back home, the voters don't care how he votes on homosexual issues, abortion, or many other things.
Those voters you so quickly disparage realize accurately that issues like gay "marriage" and abortion aren't going to affect their substantive lives in the least. These things will affect their moral lives, if they feel that they are forced to live in a society which does not share their values. But most people are forced to concern themselves with much more mundane concerns, mostly involving the economy, taxes, and entitlements.
Once voters become dependent on government, they no longer care whether it becomes dictatorial and abusive or not. So they'll allow government to trash their culture as long as it sends them a fat welfare check.
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