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)
