What do City Council Speaker Chris Quinn and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney have in common?
They kill with cancer.
Well, not really.
But just as a band of Obama-ites dragged the presidential campaign further down the low road by crafting an ad implying that Romney’s former company, Bain Capital, was somehow responsible for a woman’s cancer death, local supporters of a paid-sick-leave bill are accusing Quinn of culpability in the death of a New York City grocery worker.
One word best describes this: despicable.
Quinn, to her great credit, has refused to be bulldozed into supporting a bill requiring private companies to provide employees with paid sick leave — in effect, imposing a costly tax on small business.
Enter the New York Paid Sick Days Campaign — a gaggle of left-wing groups spearheaded by labor’s cats-paw, the Working Families Party.
The group rallied before City Hall Wednesday, essentially blaming Quinn for the stomach-cancer death of 34-year-old grocery clerk Felix Trinidad.
His supermarket, you see, provides no paid sick leave.
The activists trotted out Trinidad’s widow: “He would have been better if the bill had been passed, because he wouldn’t have had to worry so much about having to miss work,” said Anastacia Gonzalez.
But there’s no evidence whatsoever that paid sick days would have altered the outcome of what turned out to be Trinidad’s final illness — and plenty to suggest that the bill Quinn is resisting would do a lot of damage to the employment prospects of thousands of other New Yorkers.
Those details have been parsed in this space before — but while we continue to consider the bill economically and socially corrosive, the subject surely should be open to discussion.
Supporters seem to think otherwise.
Christine Quinn, to them, is not to be debated so much as she is to be vilified.
Our differences with the speaker are myriad — but we have never known her to be anything other than reasonable in debate and honorable in commitment.
Not so her opponents here.
To debase the discourse by deploying a widow’s grief as a political weapon represents an appalling low for the Working Families Party — not surprising, we suppose, but disgusting nevertheless.
The party, and its masters, have earned New York’s contempt.