Gays aren’t last. There are smaller minorities that are so far behind they’re not even mentioned.

There are ways around this problem. 1) Go to the federal level. 2) Ignore same-sex marriage but eliminate marriage from the books and enact civil unions for every New Yorker; let couples decide if they’re union is marriage or not. 3) Eliminate sex from the books. If the state does not recognize you as female or male, they cannot discriminate against you in anyway. 2 and 3 are far too libertarian to swallow, but they’d work.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=46163031097

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=39366464226

At this point there is no faction of the Republican Party that harbors any love for Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. That shared stance is (pretty much) what unites and defines Republicans constitutionwise.

The history so far is that around 1995 the Hawai’i efforts got Democratic liberals on board for gay marriage/civil unions. Vermont in 2000 led to the Democratic Left faction coming on board. Massachusetts persuaded moderate Democrats in 2005.

Now it’s a fight for the support of centrists and it is at least partly tied to California’s legalization and (?)delegalization in 2008. I’m watching pollings to see if by itself that will do it; often it takes two big affairs and a couple of years of backlash effects/fadeout to win that very big bloc over on Culture War issues. (Maybe a Californian referendum vote in 2010 is the second event. Quien sabe.) But when the centrists tip to the liberal side, the conservative side has to retreat to deeply Red states.

Winning over moderate Republicans to support of the liberal-associated point of view is when a supermajority is formed and Culture War issues end. (Things like no fault divorce and school prayer iirc have reached that point.) Usually some Right factional leader will decide to go over and his following then gets very quiet about the issue before then. Eventually some significant social conservative (aka Religious Right) person will do so too. And then suddenly people seem conveniently not to really remember things ever having been different.

All the loud conservative claims about the evil of divorce and it being the province of dissolute liberals became a murmur when Reagan became the Republican nominee in 1980. When Tammy Faye Baker divorced Jim Baker in iirc 1986 the silence about divorce became deafening. And Religious Right people have since pretended their heated and hypocritical rhetoric about divorce never happened.

So keep a good eye on Mary Cheney and her parents longterm but keep very silent. Be nice to her. Sooner or later she is going to muster the courage and marry her partner and her parents are going to show up for it. And suddenly a chunk of the Right is going to go as dumb as fish about gay marriage. And sometime after that some major Religious Right leader’s kid is going to do it too.

1. New York state government has more than enough to do with more basic problems during the next year: their budget, cleaning up government, lots of management issues.

2. The expectation is of several more Republican state Senators resigning or giving up on running for reelection during the next couple of months. For reasons of age, lack of control, ethics problems, and inability to deliver the mandatory amount of pork. But that takes a united Democratic majority that deprives them of pork, victories, and exposes them.

3. The state Assembly and governor will easily pass/sign a gay marriage legalization bill. There arent the votes for it there in the state Senate without a lot of wheeling, dealing, and armtwisting to gain four or five. What Senate Republicans will do is try to bargain out as much of a reprieve for their votes as possible.

4. Prop.8 fallout or backlash has to subside and the polling numbers settle in NY before the political math is clear enough for the state Senate Democratic leadership.

For Maryland, the state simply is not more liberal than California. This fellow’s obstructionism (like Schwarzenegger’s) is a good cover for the Maryland legislature to wait and do nothing until the polling numbers improve to where the equivalent of Prop 8 won’t pass.

check out the link to the earlier article. Their majority is that tenuous.

Time to amend the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include LGBT people, and then it’s “game over” for all the damn fool little demagogues.