Mayor Eric Adams is not known for his modesty. On the contrary. He likes to strut and blow his own horn.
Just a year ago he was forced to apologize after an old clip resurfaced where the mayor was recorded boasting about his superiority over his “cracker” colleagues during his time in the New York City Police Department.
“Every day in the police department, I kicked those crackers’ ass,” Adams says in the video at a private Harlem Business Alliance event in 2019.
Warming to the subject, he went on: “Man, I was unbelievable in the police department with 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement…[I] became a sergeant, a lieutenant and a captain.”
Some might blush at such self-congratulation, but not Adams. Now he has gone further. At the annual interfaith breakfast that he hosted on Tuesday, after the Jewish and Buddhist leaders had spoken, Adams had his say: he believes that his path to the mayoralty was divinely ordained, saying that when he implements policies, he does so in a “godlike approach.” Apparently, he doesn’t need to worry about a conflict of interest, because he also doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.
Indeed, this isn’t only a delusion about his personal power, but apparently also a political policy: Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the mayor’s closest aid, spoke for the administration when she said that it “doesn’t believe” in the separation of church and state, and characterized the mayor of New York City as “definitely one of the chosen”.
“Ingrid was so right,” Mr. Adams said, to the astonishment of some of the religious leaders who filled the New York Public Library’s glass-domed reception hall on Fifth Avenue. “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body. Church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.”
Perhaps Mr. Adams is not familiar with the US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, or American history. Separation of Church and State, while not strictly speaking, in the Constitution, is a phrase that refers to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The phrase dates back to the early days of US history, and Thomas Jefferson referred to the First Amendment as creating a “wall of separation” between church and state. It is a foundational principle of this nation.
It is frequently cited as the deciding factor in Supreme Court decisions. In Everson v. Board of Education it was reinforced when SCOTUS affirmed that, “[t]he First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state,” and “[t]hat wall must be kept high and impregnable.”
Yet Mr. Adams boldly said, “I can’t separate my belief because I’m an elected official.”
At another point, Mr. Adams seemed to suggest that it was a mistake for the Supreme Court to ban mandated prayer in public schools, as it did in 1962. “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” he said.
Mr. Adams’s suggestion that he did not endorse the divide alarmed some New Yorkers in the audience, including Rabbi Abby Stein. She said that she and several people sharing her table had the same, immediate reaction upon hearing the mayor’s remarks on that topic: “No, no, no, no.” Rabbi Stein said it was “unhinged and dangerous” of Mr. Adams to speak so dismissively about what she called such a critical tenet of American society.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, described herself on Tuesday afternoon as “speechless” upon hearing the mayor’s remarks.
“The mayor is entitled to his own religious beliefs or non-beliefs, and, the N.Y.C.L.U. would defend his right to hold those beliefs,” Ms. Lieberman said. “But, as mayor, he’s bound to uphold the Constitution, which provides for separation of church and state. And the separation of church and state is essential for the mayor and everyone else in the country to be able to freely exercise their own religious or nonreligious values.”
Mayor Adams concluded by expressing the belief that God had chosen him to be mayor of New York City: “I strongly believe in all of my heart, God said, ‘I’m going to take the most broken person and I’m going to elevate him to the place of being the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe.”
