Editorial: The empire strikes back — against progressive prosecutors and civil liberties
It’s difficult to imagine the recent history of policing and the criminal justice system if not for the most egregious acts perpetrated by progressive prosecutors that have been cheered by the mainstream public. A few prominent examples of this include the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, in which the local prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, was responsible for not charging the officer who killed Brown (he was charged with failing to follow orders that led to a shooting) or the prosecution of the Central Park Five—the five young black men arrested for gang-raping an elderly white woman—in which McCulloch refused to hold the five defendants accountable for their own behavior in the attack.
On Friday, the New York Times published a long article—published by investigative reporter Michael Schmidt—documenting the systemic prosecution of people that took place in the state of New York. After New York passed a sweeping bill that legalized a number of legal recreational activities for LGBT people, a pair of advocates—Eugene O’Donnell and Steven Goldstein—wrote a letter to New York legislators with a proposal to change New York’s laws to legalize same-sex marriage, and then proposed a petition to let marriage equality advocates petition for marriage legalization to be given a wider berth in the state’s laws.
Within hours, the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene announced that it would begin enforcing New York’s anti-discrimination laws by enforcing the state’s ban on discrimination against transgender people, and then followed that up by announcing that it would no longer consider new marriage proposals within its framework.
The New York Times followed up with the following article:
The New York State Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, responding to a petition filed by gay and lesbian rights groups seeking to overturn the state’s laws against sex discrimination, announced on Sunday that it would no longer consider petitioners who seek to marry, adopt or make other changes to family law. The