Today is Tuesday, January 25, 2022. Today the wife of the reprehensible Robert F. Kennedy who made insensitive and deplorable comments at a recent antivaccine rally in Washington, D.C., on Sunday denounced her own husband for his remarks. This latest public disagreement between husband and wife was featured in a RawStory online article written by Bob Brigham entitled “‘Reprehensible’: Prominent antivaxxer gets denounced by his own wife after ranting about Anne Frank.” How’s that for division? If your wife is not even on your side, who can you trust? But in this case, Kennedy’s remarks deserve condemnation from all sides. Part of Kennedy’s bizarre comments was this pearl of inanity: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did.” What the fuck! Was the scion of the late senator on something when he thundered this at the rally? Kennedy’s comments were immediately trashed by the Auschwitz Memorial Museum as well.

Kennedy’s wife, former Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines said this about her husband’s terrible comments: “My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive.” She added, “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own.”

This did not mark the first time that Kennedy was criticized by his own family for his antivax rules. The members of the Auschwitz Memorial said it best: “Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured and murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines & limitations during a global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.” This was posted on the organization’s website on January 23.

To give the misguided Kennedy his due, he did post an apology on his Twitter feed sometime ago in which he did “apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors. My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.” I still don’t understand what he means in his second line here. I don’t like the phrase, “technologies of control,” like he’s comparing vaccine mandates designed to protect lives with this dystopian image. He’s still an asshole, in my mind.

A more close-to-home issue that New Yorkers can all identify with is the shocking rise in gun violence in the city and how our new mayor, Eric Adams, is going to address that issue going forward. In both The New York Times and the Daily News, articles on Adams’ declared war on violence appear today. I’ll refer to just one, in today’s Times, on page 1 in the story, “Adams Unveils Plan to Quell Gun Violence,” written by Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Ashley Southall.

To quash the growing spike in gun violence, Adams announced a new initiative yesterday to address the troubling phenomenon. This comes on the heels of the recent shootings of two police officers responding to a domestic dispute at a West 135th Street apartment where a 47-year-old gunman blasted two young police officers. One, Jason Rivera, 22, died at the scene, while the other, Wilbert Mora, 27, just died from his wounds today. Even the gunman, Lashawn McNeil, died yesterday after being shot by a rookie policeman, Officer Sumit Sulan, who went along with the two officers on the call. He was just assigned originally to observe Rivera and Mora, and he got a traumatic shock to the system when he was able to end the ambush by hitting the gunman in the right arm and head as he was stepping over the bodies of the two fallen officers. No matter how you feel about the police, this is a real tragedy. McNeil was suspected of stealing the gun used in the ambush, a Glock, that tore into the bodies of both young officers.

In his speech yesterday, Adams called for immediate changes to add police officers to city streets in order to remove those blasted guns that seem to be in the hands of so many hoodlums these days. He said, “We will not surrender our city to the violent few.”

Adams’ plan included the restoration of an antigun police unit and calling on state lawmakers to make a number of changes, including those to New York’s bail law and to a law that altered how the state deals with teenage defendants.

As we have all read, gun violence has risen during the pandemic, as historic lows contributed to the highest number of shootings in a decade, while the number of murders approached 500 in 2021. Adams, as you recall, achieved his mayoralty victory by portraying himself as the law-and-order candidate, in which he touted his own association with the police department as a former police captain. He said that he would appoint judges who worked to keep violent criminals off the streets and would assist state lawmakers to alter laws concerning bail for defendants who are deemed dangerous as well as lowering the minumum age that someone can be charged as an adult.

Adams’ plans here did not sit well with progressive lawmakers and criminal justice reform activists who rejected his calls on judges to consider dangerousness when setting bail or to allow harsher prosecutions for gun crimes under Raise the Age which increases the age of criminal responsibility for young defendants caught with brandishing weapons. One critic of the mayor’s plan, “Anthonine Pierre, the deputy director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, said that the plan offered by the mayor was little more than an expansion of policing cloaked in the language of public health.” She said the mayor’s plan does not provide social services that these children and their families so desperately need. She made this observation, “If there’s anyone who needs to be in Family Court, it’s a 12-year-old who has been convinced to carry a gun.”

No matter how you feel about this matter, there have been, unmistakably, several well-publicized incidents of violence throughout the city in recent memory: a woman pushed to her death at a Times Square subway station; a baby accidentally shot in the Bronx; a 19-year-old Burger King worker shot to death during a robbery in Manhattan. Police officers have also been wounded in shootings in the Bronx, East Harlem, and on Staten Island. And now we have the double shooting of two police officers on Friday.

What is central here is the public perception of crime and how anxious people feel while traveling through the five boroughs. Are New Yorkers themselves demanding a change in the situation here? I believe it’s a complex issue that demands more than one simple solution, as long as adding more police officers is not seen as a way to just crack down on communities of color. We don’t need to return to the days when people like Amadou Dialio and Eric Garner were killed by police.

I believe that Adams has his work cut out for him with regard to turning the situation around with respect to gun violence. So many cities in the United States are facing the same spurt in firearm shootings all around.

I question why no one even raises the specter of introducing tougher gun control laws in Congress to combat this increased threat. What has happened to this movement, I wonder? There was so much momentum on this front after the terrible Parkland, Florida, massacre that claimed 17 innocent lives, which occurred on February 14, 2018. I was actually in Boynton Beach, Florida, visiting with Elliot’s cousin at the time of the shooting. I can say that we’ve been all been a little preoccupied with saving democracy since that time. However, I think it still should be put on Biden’s legislative agenda in the near future – after voting rights legislation is finally passed.

Today I read in my online edition of Gay City News about the passing of a titanic gay rights figure who was probably not known in many other circles than the obvious one. His name was Arnie Kantrowitz and he died at the age of 81 on January 21 from complications of COVID-19, according to his life partner, Dr. Lawrence Mass.

Kantrowitz was a former leader of the Gay Activist Alliance in its first year in 1970. He was a professor of English at the College of Staten Island from 1965 to 2006. He started a pioneering Gay Studies course at the same school where he taught for so many years.

I remember him for his groundbreaking 1977 memoir titled Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay which dealt with his struggles coming to terms with his homosexuality pre-Stonewall (pre-1969) and how he passionately threw himself into gay liberation soon thereafter. I was very influenced by this book as I quietly struggled with the same issues back then. So I thank Kantrowitz for his bravery and honesty in writing this book.

Later in 1985, during the AIDS crisis, Kantrowitz cofounded the Gay and Lesbian Antidefamation League (later GLAAD) with his closest friend, activist, and gay film historian Vito Russo, who wrote the marvelous book The Celluloid Closet before dying of AIDS in 1990, whose primary purpose was to counter the lack of coverage – and defamatory coverage – of the LGBTQ community in the media, especially by tabloids such as the repulsive New York Post.

Kantrowitz was born on November 26, 1940, in Newark, New Jersey. In his memoir, Kantrowitz writes how he despised his hometown and couldn’t wait until he could escape his childhood home to find love and success in New York.

If you haven’t read his autobiography, I suggest you do so if you can.

Stay safe and be well.