“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” – Thomas Paine.
I think there is no worse tyranny that to force a free man or woman to pay for what he does not want, to do work he does not seek, to live a life he does not choose merely because you think it would be good for him. The mayor of New York has no right to do this to the people in the carriage trade, or to their horses, the animal rights groups have no right to force their disturbing and unyielding vision of life on people who do accept it or choose it.
A mayor is an elected official, his role is not to play God but to protect the freedom and property of citizens. In this, he has failed.
That is the tyranny here. There is no reasoning with the mayor or the animal rights groups, they have stepped out of the democratic process, they are not rational or open-minded, they will not listen to reason or negotiate. It is just like administering to the dead.
The mayor’s truly awful and much hated bill to gut the carriage trade needs to pass the City Council, and quickly, so that the carriage trade and their lawyers will finally have clear and actionable grounds on which to fight it. It smells awful, there is no guarantee, but a good chance a judge will smell it too.
You can’t go to court and stop something that has not occurred, or that has not caused damage or suffering. Unfortunately, you have to wait until the danger is real, the damage is upon you, and the injustice is clear. Once the mayor’s bill passes the City Council, that will be possible.
It’s time to stop this charade of a democratic process and go to court. This is now a civil rights issue as much as it is an animal rights issue. (At the hearing this morning, city officials conceded that no horses have died in modern history, and four have been injured in motor vehicle collisions in the past several decades.)
The bill is outrageous. It promises the carriage trade a new stable in the park that almost no one in the city believes will, or should, be built. The carriage controversy is a crisis that does not exist. Five different city boards have to approve the mayor’s stable project, and no city proposal to appropriate public park land has been approved in New York in decades.
There are substantial surrounding the city’s effort to grab precious parkland in the face of overwhelming opposition.
The mayor seems arrogant, but in this case, that may just be masking stupidity, in the carriage dispute, he has just made a host of new enemies. According to reporters in New York (some are former colleagues), the mayor’s office is reeling from the intense opposition to the bill, which they thought was a sure thing. “I wouldn’t be shocked if they withdrew it,” said one.
All three newspapers are asking the question on everyone’s minds – how can the city justify spending more than $21 million on a stable renovation in Central Park when there are 55,000 homeless people living on the street of New York City? The horses have good homes, they are clean, warm in the winter, safe and dry.
Many people in New York are not nearly so fortunate.
Tyranny is now the issue.
Tyranny is the abuse of authority or power by a single leader, a government, or a group of people without any control or limits. The mayor’s actions are tyrannical. He has no right to threaten the independence, property and way of life of honest and hard-working citizens, he has sworn to serve them as well as real estate developers with lots of money.
The animal rights groups in New York have no mandated right to interfere so recklessly in the lives of people and their animals – these people have broken no laws, violated no regulations, pose no kind of threat to public safety or welfare.
Thomas Paine understood that tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, the harder the conflict, the more glorious and meaningful the triumph. I believe much good will come of this, for people, for animals, if the carriage trade can stay strong and if we can stand strong alongside of them.
There is outrage and bewilderment all over New York City this morning as the City Council meets today to hold public hearings on the mayor’s proposal to disembowel the carriage trade, put scores of people out of work, misuse tens of millions of dollars of public money, ignore the pubic will and send more than 100 horses out of their safe lives and into peril.
Even the slumbering New York Times, which has for years turned up its nose at this story which is literally right under its nose, has begun to awaken to the troubling issues that underlie what is becoming an open scandal.
The issues here have gone well beyond the horses and their welfare. Today, they called it The Problem That Doesn’t Exist. Better late than never.
I am besieged with messages from people hoping huge mobs storm the City Council today, asking people to blizzard their politicians with messages of support for the horses and the drivers. I have to admit, in a different context this would make some sense, but I did not go to New York this morning, I am not sending any e-mails or asking anyone else to do the same.
I hope the City Council passes the mayor’s noxious bill, and as soon as possible. It is past time.
Lawyers can then go to court, seek injunctions to stay the new regulations – which would essentially destroy the carriage trade as it exists today – and seek the help of the court system in checking this overreach of government authority. It has happened many times in New York City and elsewhere. Many other interests are waiting to challenge this new legislation – the pedicab drivers, public park advocates, taxpayer groups, possibly the Central Park Conservancy.
Lawsuits are not easy, either to file or to win. Neither is being hacked to death by a thousand cuts.
It is clear to any rational person by now that the mayor is not willing to negotiate these issues in good faith. He will not meet with the carriage or their representatives, visit the stables, even explain his rabid determination to ban the horses from the city.
The animal rights groups are also irrational, unabashedly ignorant about animals, and far from the mainstream of animal or civic thinking. There is simply no point in carrying out the charade of negotiation and compromise, they will never stop seeking to destroy the carriage trade, this legislation just affirms that.
This bill is an irrational measure – it even restricts the working hours of a wood and metal carriage and requires horses to have computer chips implanted because of the paranoid accusations of the animal rights movement that carriage horses are constantly being injured and squirreled secretly out of the city.
The campaign against the people in the carriage is both a civil rights and human rights issue. They have been harassed, insulted, screamed at, spit upon, lied about, marginalized and de-humanized.
The drivers have been accused of torture abuse, thievery, alcoholism and every kind of deception, the caricatures of them suggest a new kind of cultural racism, where an entire class of people can be described as something other than human, and thus drive from the moral center of the community and destroyed. In his obsession with the horses, the mayor is attempting to force the drivers into small green cabs in the outer boroughs, without every asking them what they want or showing any sensitivity or compassion for what they their lives are like.
“Whatever the government does, it has to have a rational basis, connected to a legitimate government interest,” says Norman Siegel, attorney for the New York Carriage Trade. “And,” he added, “I don’t know what the legitimate government interest is in getting rid of the horse carriage industry.”
To be rational means to listen to reason, to be sensible, to think without argument and emotion. New York State law requires that governmental regulations be rational and reasonable. It requires that the government show that it and the people have a legitimate interest in regulating an industry, as it public health and safety. Regulations cannot be imposed simply because some without any legal standing decides something is good or something is bad.
Or something, suddenly and with no evidence, is abuse.
There is no evidence that the horses pose a danger to public health or safety, NYClass’s private and obsessive opinion does not represent a legitimate public interest. The group – and the mayor – have no recognized expertise in equine health or welfare and have never been elected by anyone to anything.
Defeating the mayor’s proposal in City Council will not stop the attacks on the carriage trade, it will just postpone them. Only the courts have the authority to stop this very cruel and destructive campaign.
The mayor, who never once rode in a carriage or mentioned the horses in his long public career until he was given hundreds of thousands of dollars by animal rights supporters, has said again this week his ultimate hope is to ban the carriage trade completely. The mayor and his wealthy animal rights contributors will simply try other means of accomplishing what they can’t persuade the public to support, or defend in any rational way.
The carriage trade needs to shed it’s penchant for closed doors and secret meetings and waiting and arguing and get out into the open, where these issues can be confronted squarely and directly, and where they have the best hope of being protected and defended from these relentless and predatory attacks.
By now it is clear that there is no animal rights movement in America, just a rigid and increasingly disconnected idea that animals must be separated from people and removed from their everyday lives whenever and wherever possible. The horses need the courts as well as the carriage drivers.
I hope the bill passes. I hope they go to court. That is the best chance to save the horses, and save the carriage trade. Defeating the measure will do neither.