The New York governor should focus on a real crisis in her state rather than claim offense at Donald Trump’s juvenile social media posts.

The Democratic governor of New York did not miss the opportunity this weekend to comment on the White House’s post on X portraying Donald Trump as pope.

She tweeted (X-ed?):

Forgive me for nearly forgetting her Catholic credentials, given her enthusiastic support for abortion.

Bring my your tired, your poor, your huddled pregnant masses, yearning to end the lives of your unborn.

Okay, she didn’t say that. But her first reaction to the now infamous and yet unsolved Supreme Court leak of the Dobbs opinion, which threw Roe v. Wade out, was to bemoan her infant granddaughter’s potential inability to choose abortion at some future date in some state.

She said in a statement that night:

“I am horrified by the apparent draft Supreme Court opinion leaked this evening that would overturn the right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. For the sake of women across the country, this should not be the Supreme Court’s final opinion when it comes to abortion rights.

“We have been fighting this battle for too long. I refuse to go backwards. I refuse to let my new granddaughter have to fight for the rights generations have fought for and won, rights that she should be guaranteed.

Good thing Hochul’s daughter didn’t choose abortion.

Days after the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Hochul went to a statue of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman in Central Park to assure Texan women and girls that Lady Liberty will embrace them if they want abortions. Around the same time, Hochul also said, as she commemorated women’s suffrage upstate in Seneca Falls:

Get your damn hands off our bodies because we are sick and tired of being sick and tired, as Fannie Lou Hamer famously said a long time ago. She said, we are sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I know we’ve got the fighting spirit in us. We love to do this. We like a good fight. Let’s get that out there. But the fight that my mother had to fight when she was young, the fight that I fought when I was younger should not be a fight that Katie in her thirties fights today for reproductive health. . . .

New Yorkers will continue to lead the way just like in 1917 we were three years ahead of the rest of the nation in earning the right to vote for women. In 1970 we were three years ahead of the nation in ensuring reproductive health rights right here in the State of New York. And in 2021 we are laying down the gauntlet once again – if you are in a state where oppression is the law of the land, you come to New York and just like we have Lady Liberty at our Harbor who stood there since 1886 saying, send me those who’ve been oppressed, you will find a safe harbor in our state. We offer a safe harbor now today in 2021 and forward to the women across this nation.

And now New York wants to lead the way toward more suicides. We can follow our neighbors to the north who are prescribing death to the homeless and anorexic. Law is a teacher. Once we say suicide is a good, no public service campaign would combat the convenience — however miserable — that we would have ushered in.

I’m stuck on Hochul’s “damn.” It would be a damn shame if New York missed the warnings Pope Francis issued during his life — and death. (And hell might just await those of us who knew better and, for political gain, surrendered to the culture of death or showed indifference to lethal ideology.) All life is precious. When he issued his encyclical on creation, Laudato Si, it was taken as a position paper on climate change. It was about so much more. It was about the awesome responsibilities of the gifts of Creation. Including human life. (Including family.)

The White House tweet was juvenile and obnoxious. The president and the first lady bothered to go to the funeral Mass for Pope Francis — supposedly out of respect for him and for Catholics. Save us the bad jokes during our grieving period, then, as we pray for the cardinals faced with the task of electing a new pontiff. And, oh, by the way, everything isn’t about you, Donald Trump.

The same should be said to Hochul. You can move to protect vulnerable human life from prescription killing. Let Pope Trump go up in orange smoke. How about leading a revolution of adult leadership that protects those who are in the twilight of their days or otherwise not at their most productive? Because lives matter, and not just for trendy ideological slogans.