New York assembly passes same-sex marriage with bipartisan support

The Democratic-controlled New York State assembly passed Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s bill to legalize same-sex marriage Tuesday night in a decisive 85–61 vote. Gay rights advocates hailed it as a victory even though the bill stands almost no chance of being voted on in the state senate, where Republicans hold a slim two-seat majority.

“The assembly has demonstrated once again that it is the leader on civil rights and providing equality for our community where it didn't exist before in New York,” said Empire State Pride Agenda executive director Alan Van Capelle.

Notably, four assembly Republicans voted for the bill, making it the first legislative chamber in the nation to pass a marriage equality bill with bipartisan support. Though the California state assembly and senate have both passed marriage bills—the first of which was subsequently vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger—not a single California Republican legislator has voted in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. New York Log Cabin Republicans have held more than a 100 meetings to lobby legislators for marriage equality.

Assembly member Teresa Sayward, from the more conservative upstate New York, has a gay son and was the only Republican cosponsor of the bill.

“My son didn't want to be different. Lord knows he wanted to change,” said Sayward during the floor debate. “It is not a life choice. My God loves my son. And as sure as I’m standing here tonight, this is certainly not for me, nor should it be for any of us, anything other than a civil rights issue.”

New York’s legislative session ends on Thursday, and the Republican senate majority leader Joseph Bruno has said that he has no intention of taking up the bill. Insiders say there’s also a slim-to-none chance of the senate voting on the bill during a special session before the end of the year, which will put the marriage battle into the context of the 2008 elections.

Republicans and Democrats alike are pontificating about how the marriage votes will affect the elections. New York State is generally divided into conservatives in the more rural upstate region and liberals in the urban and suburban downstate. A statewide poll released on Tuesday from Quinnipiac University found 35% of registered voters supported same-sex marriage while another 35% supported civil unions but not legal marriage for gay couples. Twenty-two percent of voters said there should be no legal recognition of same-sex unions.

Republicans are conjecturing that some Democratic members who voted for the bill may lose their seats in the assembly, though Democrats have a bullet proof 107–42 seat majority. The four assembly Republicans who voted pro-marriage may also risk a challenge from the right in their primaries.

However, as one gay Republican who spoke on the condition of anonymity pointed out, not a single legislator who voted in favor of protecting marriage equality in Massachusetts in 2004 lost their seat in the following election. The same was not true in Vermont four years earlier, where 17 incumbents who voted for civil unions were unseated.

On the flip side, some assembly Democrats from the outer boroughs in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx who voted against the bill may also be targeted by pro-gay organizations.

Perhaps of more strategic importance in New York is how the bill’s consideration could affect the mix of the state senate, where a two-seat pick up for Democrats would put them in control of the chamber. Some LGBT activists believe New York’s marriage bill cannot pass the senate without a Democratic majority.

Ethan Geto, an openly gay Democratic strategist, believes that failure to act in the senate will make Republicans from liberal areas of the state vulnerable in the 2008 elections.

“If the senate Republican leadership persists in thwarting a vote on marriage, I predict that the gay community will mobilize in unprecedented fashion to raise a tremendous amount of money and provide an army of volunteers to defeat Republican senators and elect pro-marriage Democrats in 2008,” says Geto. (Kerry Eleveld, The Advocate)