Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo during last week's final New York City mayoral debate at Rockefeller Center. (Photo by Angelina Katsanis-Pool/Getty Images)

In late December 1657, the citizens of the small town of Vlissingen, now known as Flushing in the proud borough of Queens, wrote to Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Netherland. Their subject was the increasingly draconian enforcement of a provision of the 17-year-old Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions, which restricted public religious expression in the colony to the Dutch Reformed faith.

The authors of what has become known as the Flushing Remonstrance expressed their disdain for the director-general’s recent statements and actions that persecuted Quakers, Lutherans and Jews — policies that stood in opposition to both the Bible and the Dutch tradition of tolerance.

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“The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland, so love, peace and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemns hatred, war and bondage,” they wrote.

In one of the high points of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure, he invoked the Flushing Remonstrance in an........

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