When a vote is not a vote

Richard A. Sokerka

Whenever we cast our ballot, we have always been told our vote counts.

However, voting in a public poll conducted by “She Built NYC,” a public arts program established to create more statues of women around the city of New York, under the patronage of Chirlane McCray, the wife of New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, was an utter sham.

The public was asked to nominate women for a potential statue and the campaign received more than 2,000 votes for more than 300 eligible women.

The leading vote getter? St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, better known to Catholics as Mother Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants, who received 219 votes, more than double the number received by the second-place finisher.

In overwhelmingly voting for her, New Yorkers thought that a public statue of Mother Cabrini in New York City would honor her legacy to the city. After all, the founder of Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was herself an Italian immigrant, who came to New York City in 1889. She witnessed the chaos and poverty that filled the city then, and immediately established schools and orphanages against tremendous odds. Her activity in this regard was relentless until her death in 1917. She was canonized a saint by Pope Pius XII. In recognition of her holiness and service to humanity, she was named patron of immigrants in 1950.

However, as the N.Y. Post reported, McCray and her committee never intended to honor the voting process. They announced that there would be no statue in honor of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini. Despite the saint receiving the most votes in the public poll that they initiated, they reneged.

Instead, under the banner of political correctness, they said statues, for which $10 million of taxpayers’ money has been set aside, would be built instead for Rep. Shirley Chisolm, Katherine Walker, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, Billie Holiday and Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias. They received the third, fifth, seventh, 19th, 22nd, 24th and 42nd-most votes, respectively.

It should be pointed out that Johnson and Rivera, LGBT rights activists who were biological males, will be featured together in a single statue. Both were self-identified “drag queens” and co-founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The pair received a combined 86 nominations. Rodriguez-Trias, one of the founding members of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, received seven votes. They were deemed more appropriate to be honored with a statute than a saint!

Ignoring the results of a public vote begs the question: Had this committee already made up their minds for whom statues would be built?

If that was the case, the fix was in for Mother Cabrini. Despite all she did for New Yorkers in her lifetime, even if she had gotten every single vote, she would never have had a chance of this committee choosing to honor her with a statue.

This is a sad commentary on the state of politics in our culture today. The right thing to do would be for the mayor to dissolve this committee, based on its actions, and start all over to find a way for the will of the people to be heard in honoring women in the city.