Box Turtle Bulletin

Chafee signs civil unions

Trib

Rhode Island’s governor on Saturday signed into law a controversial bill legalizing same sex civil unions, but said it does not go far enough toward legalizing gay marriage.

GovernorLincoln Chafee, an independent who supports gay marriage, nonetheless signed the measure with the promise that it would move Rhode Island closer to the ultimate goal of legalizing gay marriage.

I think Chafee did the right thing.

Yes there are overly broad religious exemptions (and Chafee noted them). Yes some people will use these exemptions to unfairly discriminate.

But some Rhode Island couples very much need the protections that are provided – and honored by honorable people. We cannot stop here. Now we move forward – with the Governor – to correct the broad language and to enact true marriage equality.

Rahm Emanual Calls Marriage “Very Important”

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff for Barack Obama, was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about marriage equality. Emanuel discussed Illinois’ civil unions, which just went into effect, say that his state may go further towards marriage equality soon. “I would hope that the state would move in that direction…Tremendous progress has been made across the country on a value statement and I think that’s very important.” Emanuel refused to comment on whether Obama’s “evolving” position is important or not, but instead emphasized the progress that has been made for LGBT equality under his administration.

Three Important Questions To Ask Before Mounting A Campaign To Overturn A Marriage Ban

The respected analyst Nate Silver has a major piece at The New York Times’ blog about the prospects for marriage bans if they were brought up today on the ballot. It’s worth a read. He uses two models based on public opinion polls, and based on those models, he says that in Maine, where LGBT advocates have announced a drive to place marriage equality back on the ballot for 2012, voters are predicted to approve same-sex marriage just three years after rejecting it by about six percentage points. But it’s worth recalling that in 2009, Silver also thought the ban on same-sex marriage would fail:

When we last discussed this model, it gave Maine’s Question 1 — which reversed the State Legislature’s decision to provide for same-sex marriage — a 3-in-4 chance of being defeated. In fact, the measure won and same-sex marriage was repealed in Maine, although the results were close and within the model’s margin of error. (There’s more discussion of the Maine result here.)

He’s done a lot of tweaks to his model since then, and he now believes that Maine — and California — would have a shot at overturning their marriage bans. According to Nate’s analysis, Maine has a better prospect of overturning its ban than California does. But the one thing that his model cannot predict is the effectiveness of the two particular campaigns — the pro-equality and anti-gay sides — to shape the messages and motivate voters who are much more interested in other things. And the other thing to keep in mind, is that this is only a model. Models can only try to predict the future, about the same way your local meteorologist tries to predict the future, using very sophisticated computer models based on weather patterns. There still remains that nasty margin of error, and Silver doesn’t disclose the possible impacts of that error.

But even if the models were perfect, it’s still up to the campaigns themselves to turn those predictions into reality. And as I mentioned yesterday, it’s worth raising the questions of what kind of a campaign they intend to run this time around. I’m sure Maine’s LGBT advocates have learned quite a few lessons since 2009, but if they are relying on the perception that they’ve changed a lot of minds in their d0or-to-door grassroots campaigns since then, then I worry that we are setting ourselves up for a very expensive fall again.

Don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly support every LGBT American who is willing to stand up and fight for our rights. Maine has my complete support. But I think that a key part of supporting a campaign is the ask the hard questions, particularly where we’ve seen mistakes before. And the biggest mistakes we have made in the past, we’ve made repeatedly, not just in Maine.

Mistakes is a loaded word, so let me clarify further: in raising these issues, it’s not my intention to question the commitment or competence of those who ran past campaigns. They worked their hearts out, and did the best jobs they could possibly do with the information they had at that time. The mistakes that were made were not, I believe, a reflection of their competence — when those mistakes are made the first time. But if they are repeated again, then it will truly be the case that we only have ourselves to blame.

Having said that, I think the mistakes we made in the past centered on three critical questions we failed to ask.

Question 1: What do voters really care about?

Here’s the first hint: It’s not same-sex marriage. Frank Schubert, who ran the Maine’s 2009 anti-gay campaign as well as the California’s pro-Prop 8 campaign recognized that fact early on. As former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Niel famously said, all politics are local. Schubert recognized that politics aren’t just local, but personal. It hinges on the question, “How will this affect me?” Karen Ocamb’s brilliant analysis of the California campaign, which should be mandatory reading for everyone, describes very carefully how Schubert came to this conclusion:

During the Prop 8 Case Study workshop, Schubert said he, Flint and their team spent hours “looking at where people were and what we needed to do to reach them.”

What they found was that most Californians were very tolerant of same sex relationships. Schubert said:

“They didn’t see how gay marriage effected them, per se. It wasn’t their issue. It wasn’t something they cared to think about. It wasn’t something they wanted to talk about. It was an uncomfortable subject generally for them event to get their arms around.”

Karen wrote that analysis in 2009 as a warning to Maine, a warning that was not heeded. I still think her analysis is just as germane today as it was two years ago. If we really want to win these battles, we need to begin with an understanding of this important but uncomfortable truth: Nobody cares about same-sex marriage.

Yes, I exaggerate. Everyone has an opinion about same-sex marriage. But nobody cares about it in the personally imperative sense simply because it is something that just doesn’t affect them. A lot of people care about global warming, but we’re not exactly seeing hybrid and electric cars flying off the dealers’ lots or solar panels sprouting on rooftops.

When people go to the pols, we cannot expect them to base their vote on altruism. People vote on how an issue affects them personally. And until we make the issue about something they have a personal stake in rather than a relatively abstract notion of fairness and equality (both are politically meaningless concepts: even bigots think they’re fair and open-minded), we’re not going to really get their attention.

Question 2: What do voters really care about?

That question is the same as question 1. Notice a pattern here? I’m repeating it because successful elections are all about how to get a voter to be motivated by something he or she really cares about — something personal. Schubert understood that if voters didn’t care about marriage — which most of them personally don’t have a stake in —  they could be made to care about something else. That something else in both California and Maine turned out to be education. And so California and in Maine, Schubert took an election about something nobody cares about (gays being allowed to marry) and made it about something that everyone cares about. Again, Karen quotes Schubert with the a-ha moment:

What the research showed was that we could not win by simply affirming traditional marriage. People said, ‘Yeah, OK – but what’s the problem here. How does this impact me?’…. This forced acceptance [by the court] that gay marriage was now mandatory was a big deal – the consequences – specifically regarding religious freedom, religious expression and teaching of gay marriage in schools – and the education consequences become the most powerful in the course of the campaign.

We bet the campaign on consequences – especially on education. Education from the beginning – while it was one of three consequences – it was the one that was the most emotionally charged and the most powerful. And I remember testing an ad in focus groups in Southern California….[One ad was} with the Wirthlin couple from Massachusetts. She’s telling the story of her son Joey – about he’s being taught how a prince can marry another prince – and he’s in second grade.

There’s an African American gentleman in this group watching the ad [who] just shakes his head. So I [told the researcher to] ask him what he meant. And the guy says, ‘I’ll tell you what, if that happened to me – I would be pissed.’

And that was the moment that we decided that the campaign would rely on education.

Nate Silver’s models are based on whether people want to ban same-sex marriage. But it asks the wrong question. If he had asked whether schools want to “teach homosexuality in the schools,” he would get a very different answer. That’s why Schubert changed the question in voters’ minds.

Now you know that the issue of education was a red herring, and I know that the issue of education was a red herring, but voters don’t know that. And the beauty of that strategy is this: false charges and fears can be implanted in a little as thirty seconds, but they have an exceptionally long shelf life. Remember Willie Horton? Those adds ran twenty three years ago! Maine voters remembered the education issue very well, but I’m sure they’ve forgotten the pro-equality’s answer to that.

Question 3: What do voters really care about?

Voters care about a lot of things. They care about jobs, taxes, the economy, education (still), foreign wars, immigration — all kinds of things. They don’t care about equality because too many of them think that we have it already through other means. And they don’t get motivated by being preached to about fairness because they think they are already fair. Campaigns aren’t opportunities to teach voters what they don’t know, but rather the time to confirm to voters what they already believe with the issues they care about. That’s why our opponents changed the topic of the election.

The case of Arizona’s Prop 107 campaign in 2006 is instructive, simply because it is the ONLY campaign in which anti-marriage forces lost. People tend to dismiss it as a fluke, but it embodies a very valuable lesson. The proposed amendment to the Arizona constitution that year would have not only barred same-sex marriage, but all other domestic partnership registries as well. LGBT advocates ran a brilliant campaign pointing out how this proposed law would affect straight people — including large numbers of senior citizens who live together but haven’t married because they don’t want to give up their social security benefits. Because they weren’t married, they relied on local domestic partnership registrations for access to local services and to be able to make medical decisions for each other. It also affected a large number of unmarried straight firefighters and police officers, whose significant others would lose access to health benefits. Because it became an issue that straight people cared about — the majority in Arizona as elsewhere — it went down in defeat. A different amendment passed in 2008; that one focused exclusively on same-sex marriage, and LGBT advocates failed to find a hook that everyone could care about. And when we fail to find a hook that everyone cares about, we will lose every time.

And by the way, this isn’t true just about LGBT politics. It’s politics in general. When people voted in 2008 for president, most of them voted based on a desire for “hope” and “change” and “Yes We Can!” on the one hand, or — okay, I can’t remember what McCain wanted us to vote about. Maybe that’s why he lost as badly as he did.

Our failure to answer these three very important questions in the past have become a costly and painful lesson. Our failure in the future to heed those lessons will leave us with no one else to blame but ourselves.

Couple recognition, state by state, mid-2011 update

The first half of this year has seen some victories and some defeats; and even some which are hard to categorize. But, there certainly has been change.

The status of the various recognition mechanisms is as follows (2011 additions are in italics):

Marriage on the same terms as heterosexual marriage – 11.5% of US Population:

Massachusetts
Connecticut
Iowa
Vermont
New Hampshire
District of Columbia
New York

Civil Unions – all rights except the name – 8.2% of US Population:

New Jersey
Illinois
Hawaii
Delaware
Rhode Island

Domestic Partnerships with nearly all the rights except the name – 16.3% of US Population

California
Oregon
Washington
Nevada

Limited recognition of same-sex couples – 5.8% of US Population

Colorado – Reciprocal Benefits
Wisconsin – Domestic Partnerships
Maine – Domestic Partnerships
Maryland – Domestic Partnerships

In addition, the state of Maryland (and perhaps New Mexico) will give full recognition to same-sex marriages conducted where legal.

So about 41.8% of all US residents live in a state in which some measure of recognition is given to same sex-couples. In addition, another 7.3% of the population lives in one of the dozens of cities which offer some form of recognition and protection for same-sex couples.

Civil Unions pass Rhode Island Senate

NY Times

Less than a week after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York, the Rhode Island State Senate on Wednesday evening approved a bill allowing not marriage, but civil unions for gay couples, despite fierce opposition from gay rights advocates who called the legislation discriminatory.

Governor Chaffee is expected to sign the bill.

Mr. Chafee told reporters on Wednesday that he would probably sign the bill even though he thought the religious protections were overly broad.

“We’re taking incremental steps forward, as other states have,” he said. “We want to get on the path to full equality, and this is a step on the path.”

We will continue our fight for equality. And it appears that the first step will be to get State Senate President, M. Teresa Paiva Weed (D – Jamestown), somehow replaced. She now stands as the single biggest obstacle to civil equality in the state.

Civil Unions approved by RI Senate Committee

WPRI.com

Rhode Island moved one step closer to allowing same-sex civil unions on Wednesday afternoon after the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill to legalize them.

The committee voted 7-4 to approve the measure. The full Senate is expected to vote on the legislation Wednesday evening.

New Yorkers support marriage bill

A Quinnipiac poll reveals support for New York’s new marriage equality law. Between June 20 and June 26, Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,317 registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 2.7 percentage points.

24. Would you support or oppose a law that would allow same-sex couples to get married?

Support 54%
Oppose 40%
DK/NA 5%

Considering that this poll bracketed the June 24 vote and that the marriage bill occupied front page coverage during that period, it is fair to assume that the results for the theoretical “a law” can be imputed to the law that was passed.

This certainly must not be happy news for Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization for Marriage. Their stated plan for reversing marriage equality in New York is to

PHASE 1: Elect pro-marriage majorities next November that will approve a marriage amendment in both the Assembly and Senate during the 2013 legislative session.

PHASE 2: Protect pro-marriage candidates in the 2014 elections, so that the amendment can receive final legislative approval in the 2015 legislative session.

PHASE 3: Successfully pass the ballot measure when it goes before voters in November 2015.

I don’t think that this is intended as self-parody.

NY GOP Marriage Supporter May Turn Democrat

New York statesman and freshman state Senator Mark Grisanti ( (R-Erie and Niagara Co), who eloquently described why he supported that state’s marriage quality law even though he campaigned against in in 2010, is taking withering flack –his local hometown paper describes them as “withering body blows” –from conservatives and fellow members of the Republican party:

Grisanti fared no better with his own party as Erie County Republican Chairman Nicholas A. Langworthy made clear his disapproval that the senator went his own way on a key issue.

“For Mark to go back on his word that he gave to his constituents and to me — I am deeply disappointed,” Langworthy said.

… Langworthy and Erie County Conservative Chairman Ralph C. Lorigo were especially critical of his reneging on a promise to vote against the measure while campaigning last year.

“He informed me by text while he was on the floor,” Langworthy said of Grisanti’s Friday vote. “I urged him to stick by his word he had given. The people elected him on what he ran on. This is not tax policy or something. This is important stuff.”

Important stuff — more important to the GOP than the economy.

Got it.

Grisanti now says that he won’t rule out running for re-election as a Democrat, after rejecting the idea following his vote last Friday.

NY Times: behind the scenes

The New York Times over the weekend had a fascinating article discussing the behind-the-scenes story of the passage of New York’s marriage bill.

The story of how same-sex marriage became legal in New York is about shifting public sentiment and individual lawmakers moved by emotional appeals from gay couples who wish to be wed.

But, behind the scenes, it was really about a Republican Party reckoning with a profoundly changing power dynamic, where Wall Street donors and gay-rights advocates demonstrated more might and muscle than a Roman Catholic hierarchy and an ineffective opposition.

And it was about a Democratic governor, himself a Catholic, who used the force of his personality and relentlessly strategic mind to persuade conflicted lawmakers to take a historic leap.

Marriage happened because billionaire Republicans wanted it, because a nephew refused to speak to his aunt, because the gay groups merged to put goals ahead of ego, because Mayor Bloomberg was tireless, because a major corporation in a key district applied pressure, because the Catholic Church was late and inept, and to a large degree because Governor Cuomo wanted to live up to his father.

But it almost didn’t happen. And the Times covers a few of the more fascinating hurdles along the way.

Rhode Island Senate Committee vote tomorrow

The Rhode Island Senate is, at last, acting on the Civil Unions bill. (Boston Globe)

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a vote Wednesday on the civil union bill. If the committee endorses the legislation, it will head to the full Senate for a final vote. Until Monday the bill appeared to be languishing on the Senate agenda as time ran out on the legislative session.

This is a crappy bill. Even if you set aside that this should be a marriage bill instead of a civil unions bill, it contains provisions that are considered disproportionately generous to religious objectors.

But that stuff is, for the most part, window dressing. It’s a battle over exactly which people are entitled to legally discriminate and – as in reality these provisions will impact very few real folk – they are distractions more than they are issues.

Do you really care if Pastor Steve down at the First Church of I’m Better Than You recognizes your civil union when pricing discounts for his church’s Anti-Halloween Festival? And if so, do you care so much that you’ll give up inheritance rights or other marital benefits?

I think that Rhode Island will, in short time, join the family of marriage equality states. But until that time, let’s pass this inferior civil unions bill and then move on to lobbying for full equality.

Brazilian judge rules for marriage

In May, the Supreme Court of Brazil ruled that the nation must allow its gay couples rights and recognition comparable to marriage. Now a judge has ruled that one couple’s civil union can be converted to marriage. (AP)

A Brazilian judge has approved what is apparently the South American nation’s first gay marriage.

Sao Paulo state judge Fernando Henrique Pinto says he has ruled that two men can convert their civil union into a marriage.

Frum on New York Marriage

David Frum is a conservative Republican.

He served in the George W Bush White House, was a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and wrote for the National Review. Although he has been, in more recent years, harshly critical of the Republican Party and some of their less intellectually competent political candidates, there is no questioning that Frum is a conservative Republican.

And Frum has been a vocal opponent of marriage equality. Noting the growing instability of the family and the associated social problems that statistically increase with divorce, single parenting, and out-of-wedlock parenting, Frum viewed same-sex marriage as but one aspect of a culture that had generally devalued marriage. And in 1997 he engaged in an on-line debate with Andrew Sullivan on the subject.

But those of us who oppose gay marriage, and we remain the majority at least for now, believe that these new values are not changing the family–they are destroying it, and harming those within it. As such beliefs become more widespread, so do divorce and illegitimacy. The proponents of gay marriage can only get what they want by weakening Americans’ attachment to the traditional family even more than it has already been weakened. And as such, these proponents are hastening a process of social dissolution that has already brought misery to untold millions of people, with children suffering most grievously of all.

So one might expect Frum to be furious – or at least saddened – by New York’s marriage equality bill. One would be wrong.

Writing in CNN today, Frum said

Yet I find myself strangely untroubled by New York state’s vote to authorize same-sex marriage — a vote that probably signals that most of “blue” states will follow within the next 10 years.

I don’t think I’m alone in my reaction either. Most conservatives have reacted with calm — if not outright approval — to New York’s dramatic decision.

Why?

The short answer is that the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test.

The sky didn’t fall. As same-sex marriage gained recognition in a handful of states, the family structure didn’t continue to spiral into disarray. In fact, there have been no known negative social ramifications that can be directly linked to expanding the marriage institution to include same-sex families.

And so Frum did what an honorable person should do, he admitted his error.

In the heat of debate, it can sometimes be difficult to see our opponents as admirable. It’s much simpler to see them as vile bigots who are motivated by hate and religious extremism. And some are.

But there are also a good many people who oppose marriage equality out of a legitimate concern for the future of the family structure. They fear that same-sex marriage is another challenge to their efforts at restoring respect for the institution and the social contract that it entails.

They are wrong.

But while they are wrong, they are not bigots. And we will see a great many more who, like Frum, have publicly fought us but are honest enough to recognize – and admit – that they were wrong.

Let’s be gracious in welcoming them to our side.

Evolving Equality In America

We’ve certainly come a long way over the last half-century. In 1960, homosexuality was a criminal act in every state and territory in the union. By 2000, when Vermont enacted civil unions, more than a third of the U.S. population lived in states where gay people were still legally criminals. All that change of course with the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision. Gay people were no longer criminals, but they weren’t recognized in any other way either.

The past decade has been a very slow march toward correcting that. Nearly as many couples today can acquire at least some minimal protection and recognition of their relationships as were criminalized a decade ago, but full marriage equality remains relatively elusive. We’ve been celebrating the fact that with New York becoming the sixth state to provide for full marriage equality, the population in which the option is open to them has more than doubled. But it’s from just five percent to eleven. About the same percentage as those who weren’t subject to arrest in 1973, thirty years before Lawrence v. Texas. We can only hope it won’t take another thirty years from today to see full marriage equality as the law of the land everywhere.

The Politician and the Statesman

Two New York Senators who had previously opposed marriage equality in New York voted ended up voting for it when the chips were down Friday night. They both explained their change of votes during the roll call, and their explanations provide a textbook illustation of the difference between a politician and a statesman.

One was Sen. Carl Kruger (D-Kings Co) who had been one of three Senate Democrats who blocked a vote on same-sex marriage in 2009 when Democrats controlled the chamber. His change of heart, chronologically at least, came after he was accused last March of accepting $1 million in bribes in return for political favors. Along with that scandal came allegations from the The New York Post — and one must always consider the source whenever the Post is involved — that Kruger laundered at least some of that money through his reportedly unacknowledged gay lover with whom he shares a house with along with the identified lover’s mother. Sidestepping the possible outing, The New York Times merely said, “The gay nephew of the woman he lives with, Dorothy Turano, was so furious at Mr. Kruger for opposing same-sex marriage two years ago that he had cut off contact with both of them, devastating Ms. Turano.”

Whatever the truth may be, Kruger certainly had a change of heart by the time he cast his vote last Friday. And in explaining his vote before the Senate, Kruger defended himself by giving a long list of gay-rights legislation he had supported — hate crimes legislation, anti-dissemination bills, anti-bullying bills — and more incredibly, even tried to explain his change as not being a change at all. He was with us all along, he says. Except, of course, for when he wasn’t.

Oh well, a yes vote is a yes vote, and every yes vote is vital when the margins are so thin like this. But Kruger’s statement was especially memorable because moments before, freshman Senator Mark Grisanti (R-Erie and Niagara Co), who had campaigned against same-sex marriage leading up the the November 2011 elections, explained his vote this way:

As you may know, prior to me coming here, it’s only been about six months and the issue of same-sex marriage has never been a strong topic of discussion among family and friends. I simply opposed it in the Catholic sense of my upbringing. And I have stated that I have a problem with the term “marriage.” But at the same time, I have also said that I have a problem with the rights that are involved that are being overlooked. I have never, in the past four months, researched an issue or met with so many people and groups on a single issue such as this. I have struggled with this immensely, I can tell you that. I have read numerous documents, independent studies, and talked with a lot of people on both sides of this issue. As a Catholic I was raised to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.

I’m not here however as a Senator who is just Catholic. I’m also here with a background also as an attorney, to which I look at things and I apply reason. I know with this decision, many people who voted for me will question my integrity a short time ago. I tell you though that I have studied this issue. To those who know me, they know that I have struggled with it. To those whose support I may lose, please know that in the past what I was telling you and what I believed at that time was the truth. But by doing the research, and ultimately doing what I believe to be the right thing, to me, shows integrity. I would not respect myself if I didn’t do the research with an open mind and make a decision, an informed decision, based on the information before me.

A man can be wiser today than yesterday, but there will be no respect for that man if he has failed in his duty to do the work. I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage. Who am I to day that someone doesn’t have the same rights that I have with my wife that I love, or have the thirteen hundred-plus rights that I share with her?

But there’s another important point here that this bill brings up, and that’s its religious protections. Because I am Catholic. Under this bill the religious aspects and belief are protected as well as for not-for-profits. There’s no mandate that the Catholic Church or any other religious organization perform ceremonies or rent halls. There cannot be a civil claim or an action against the church. It protects benevolent organizations such as the Knights of Columbus and many others. And as a lawyer I feel confident that the religious organizations and the others are protected.

We in this state have recognized same-sex couples who are married in other states and are now in New York. I have read studies about civil unions that show that they do not work, and causes chaos. I believe this state needs to provide equal rights and protection to all of its residents.

I struggled with the word marriage as between a man and a woman — that’s how I’m raised. But I also struggle with the rights that are lacking for same-sex couples, and I’ve stated this numerous times. I cannot deny that right or opportunity for someone nor stand in the way of allowing them to obtain the rights that I have.

I’m not going to get into the philosophical arguments, because I’ve heard them all. But for me, the issue boils down to this: I’ve done the research, and I believe that a person can be wiser today than yesterday. I apologize to those who feel offended, to those I have hurt with the votes that I had six months ago. But I believe you can be wiser today than yesterday when you do the work. I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, of people of my district and across this state, the state of New York and those people who make this the great state that it is, the same rights that I have with my wife…

That is a long, long way from where Grisanti was just last March, when he told a Buffalo radio station, “To me, marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s been a term, a term of ours for years that has been around for thousands of years. It’s like calling a cat, a dog.”

Like I said, every vote is important. Kruger’s “yes” vote, however it came about and however he tried to explain away his prior opposition, is every bit as important as Grisanti’s. But in the end, the events of Friday night clearly showed that there is a huge difference between political posturing and statesmanship.

True Colors

The Empire State building was already set to light up in rainbow colors last night in honor of the city’s Pride celebration this weekend, but given that it was the same night on which marriage equality became the law of the state, the new color scheme was given greater significance. And why not light up the night? New York Freedom to Marry notes that the New York victory represents several historic firsts:

• For the first time, a Republican-led chamber, the New York State Senate, joined the Democrat-led Assembly in passing marriage legislation;
• The marriage bill was strongly championed by a governor who ran for office on his pledge to pass a bill and then campaigned steadily for it, making it one of his top priorities and committing political capital to its passage;
• A large number of America’s most prominent businesses including Xerox Corporation, Alcoa, and McGraw-Hill, and the heads of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, along with New York’s most important labor unions, urged passage of the bill;
• And numerous professional athletes, including NBA star Steve Nash, New York Rangers star Sean Avery, and New York Giants great Michael Strahan, joined the chairman of the New York Giants and owner of the New Jersey Nets in speaking out for the bill.

While Republican support was neither broad nor deep — only four GOP state Senators voted for the marriage equality bill — it was nevertheless critical and historic. The Republican caucus easily could have blocked the measure from coming to the floor but didn’t. Sen. Dean Skelos, the majority leader of the Republican-controlled chamber who personally voted against the bill, could have refused to allow the bill to come forward, but didn’t. A lot of those GOP Senators who voted against the bill could have prevented its passage in several critical stages along the way, but chose to allow it to pass without their fingerprints on it.

Say what you will about their votes against equality — I’m sure their grandchildren in future decades won’t look at those votes with pride — but I think it bears remembering that marriage equality ended up being the work of the entire chamber, and not just those who voted yes. It’s true that the those who voted yes are the ones who today and in the future deserve to be wrapped in glory. They are the ones who actually made it happen. And those who worked feverishly to prevent marriage equality (I’m looking at you, Diaz) will be scorned by future generations the way we today regard the Dixiecrats of 1948. But the fact remains that sometimes just standing aside so that the rising tide of justice can sweep through is just as important as voting yes. Openly gay Sen. Thomas K. Duane said that everyone in the New York Senate was a hero last night regardless of their vote. I suspect that this is what he was talking about.