Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyDecember 19th, 2013
As we close out the last days of the year, 17 states and DC offer full marriage equality (or are waiting for the effective date of legislation):
Massachusetts
Connecticut
Vermont
Iowa
New Hampshire
District of Columbia
New York
Washington
Maryland
Maine
Rhode Island
Delaware
Minnesota
California
New Jersey
Illinois
Hawaii
New Mexico
Three more offer everything-but-the-name Domestic Partnerships
Oregon
Nevada
Colorado
And Wisconsin offers limited Domestic Partnership rights.
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Hyhybt
December 19th, 2013
New year, new purple crayon to fill in more of that map; this year’s is worn down to a nub.
SC
December 19th, 2013
What percentage of the US population now live in states with equality? I could do this myself, but laziness.
buddyglass
December 19th, 2013
Per Nate Silver’s analysis from earlier this year, here are the states most amenable to marriage equality that don’t appear in the above list:
Pennsylvania
Michigan
Arizona
Of those three, as of 2012, only Pennsylvania had greater than 50% (projected) support for a s.s.m. ballot initiative.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/how-opinion-on-same-sex-marriage-is-changing-and-what-it-means/
Seems reasonable to predict that Oregon, Nevada, Colorado and Wisconsin will, at some point, hop over into the “full rights” column and that Pennsylvania will join them. It’ll be slow going after that, though.
Richard Rush
December 19th, 2013
Pennsylvania, in particular, is feeling some pressure. It shares a border with four marriage equality states – New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. And on the heavily traveled Northeast Amtrak/I-95 corridor from Washington to Boston, Philadelphia, PA is the only city without marriage equality.
I suspect that when marriage equality comes to PA, it will be via the PA Supreme Court, and although I have more confidence in the court than the legislature, that’s not saying much. And I don’t think there is any possibility that Governor Corbett (R) would sign marriage legislation.
Michael C
December 19th, 2013
While Oregon is officially a “domestic partnership” state, they do recognize all legal, out-of-state marriages as “marriage”.
An additional (albeit piddly)category would be “States that allow legally out-of-state married same-sex couples to file jointly on their state tax returns”:
Missouri
Timothy Kincaid
December 19th, 2013
SC:
38.6% marriage,
3.7% full DPs
1.9 limited DPs
44.1% state recognition
7.3% live in cities (but not states) that offer some form of recognition (usually with few rights). It may be more as I have not updated my city count in quite a while.
Over half of US citizens live somewhere that recognizes same-sex couples in some way.
Richard Rush
December 20th, 2013
Regarding Pennsylvania, I should have mentioned that their is also a Federal court case scheduled for trial next June.
Al Raymond
December 20th, 2013
I know this will be fully covered in forthcoming issues of BTB and elsewhere; but while our part of the world seems to be slowly gaining the heights of enlightenment and freedom, large parts of it—perhaps most of it—are sinking deeper into new repression and slavery.
India, with well over a billion people, has reinstated the hateful law imposed on it by the British, and there is little hope parliament will soon repeal it.
Russia repealed its Stalinist “sodomy” law 20 years ago, but Putin is obviously trying to reinstate it in all but name. Just as the Nazis temporarily suspended their anti-Jewish laws for the “benefit” of tourists during the 1936 Olympics, I suspect Putin will resume his anti-gay policies when the Sochi Olympics are over and the tourists have gone home.
And now, the latest disaster—Uganda’s parliament has just voted to enact the horrific “Anti-Homosexual” law providing, among other things, life in prison even for a single private consensual act, and requiring even family members to report a gay relative to the police, under threat of being tehemselves imprisoned for failing to do so. What an obscenity!
So our community has no cause to be complacent; the age-old struggle continues.
Timothy Kincaid
December 20th, 2013
One day. One single solitary friggen day and my map is out of date.
But I’m okay with that!
Timothy Kincaid
December 20th, 2013
Only three more states and couples could drive from sea to shining sea without losing full recognition of their rights as a couple anywhere along the way.
Granted, those states are Nebraska, Kentucky, and West Virginia. But who expected Utah?
FYoung
December 21st, 2013
@ SC “What percentage of the US population now live in states with equality?”
With the addition of Utah, it’s now 38.9% (123,031,693) of the U.S. population, according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States#Enactment_of_marriage_laws_.28table.29
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