Revelers celebrate the passage of a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in New York State outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher St, Friday, June 24, 2011, in New York. The measure passed, 33-29, following weeks of tense delays and debate.
The most surprising thing about Friday’s vote by lawmakers in Albany to make New York America’s sixth and largest state where gays can marry one another is not that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in a patient display of vote-counting that would have impressed Lyndon Johnson, peeled off enough Republican Senators to pass his bill. Instead, what was most eye-raising was how quickly opponents of gay marriage had shape-shifted their arguments to try to stave off a legislative vote that would be additional proof that gay marriage is not merely a product of the “runaway” judiciary they have blamed for the so long.
When New York’s state Senate passed the bill, 33-to-29, cheers of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” erupted in the chamber. The historic vote followed an 80-to-63 vote in the state Assembly last week (the fourth time the lower house had passed a marriage equality bill) — and more than a week of parliamentary maneuvers by conservatives and Republicans to keep the bill from coming to a vote. In the end, the Senate passed the bill into law despite a Republican majority and despite the G.O.P. making gains in the 2008 election. Although gay marriage has yet to win a single statewide referendum, its legislative success in New York on Friday shows that it is quickly advancing in nearly every other way, from legal victories in California courts and throughout the federal judiciary to an increasingly enthusiastic ally in the White House.(See a timeline of gay rights in the U.S.)
Cuomo’s full-on blitz in Albany has been a powerful example of the kind of power a governor can wield when he fully commits himself to a legislative goal. Just six months into his first office, the fight over gay rights will almost certainly be a defining one for his first term. It puts to rest worries expressed last year by gay rights activists with long memories who fretted that Cuomo’s lukewarm embrace of gay issues while working for his father, the former Gov. Mario Cuomo. What they were worried about was electing someone who said what they perceived to be the “right things” on gay rights, but wasn’t willing to do the head-knocking and name-taking that it often takes to make policy aspirations into new law. He’s passed that test, and over the past week of working with clergy and their allied legislators to strengthen religious exemptions, he’s shown he knows how to negotiate, too. On June 17, a knot of Republicans in the New York Senate had demanded the religious exemptions in the bill — already present in the version passed by the Assembly — be further expanded to ameliorate what they said was the coercive nature of the proposed law and the potential exposure of religious institutions to lawsuits for refusing to accommodate same-sex couples. One legislator reportedly called the demand his “line in the sand.”
But in war, every victory creates winners and losers — and losers can often become enemies. So the stakes are high for Cuomo, as losers aren’t likely to forget this week anytime soon.
In this case, those with powerful memories would include the influential Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who chose to issue a rallying cry on his blog last week that cast the debate in a novel but bellicose way. “We are living in New York, in the United States of America — not in China or North Korea,” said Dolan a few hours before Cuomo formally introduced his bill. “In those countries, government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiques from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means.” It was Dolan’s declarations that most likely helped etch the Republican line in the sand.
(Watch gay couples getting married in the heartland.)
Even though many opponents of gay marriage, including leading religious thinkers, have long predicted that wider legal and social acceptance of gay marriage is only a matter of time, Dolan’s call was part of a furious push back from conservatives who warned defecting Republicans that they would be punished at the polls for their apostasy in supporting gay marriage, a goal-line defense that kept lawmakers in session several days beyond when the session was expected to end. The intensity of his opposition to gay marriage is not new — Catholic prelates and many other religious thinkers have argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage could be the undoing of Western Civilization. What is new is his attempt to cast the struggle in a thoroughly libertarian, Tea Party-friendly style. The words “government” and “dictate” and “presumes” — and not to mention, “China” and “North Korea” — were easily reminiscent of language about the tyranny of the federal government popularized since 2008 by some Tea Party members and embraced by many of the most influential GOP politicians, from Texas Gov. Rick Perry to Sen. Rand Paul in Kentucky.
Opponents needed a new tact since the New Yorkers who will now be able to rush out to get married aren’t the beneficiaries of an out-of-control judiciary, the usual object of conservative blame. Instead, wedding thank-yous will be owed to elected officials — including the late-breaking Republican senators who made the win possible and the face-to-face lobbying by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent. It was those folks who simply decided that momentum in favor of gay marriage was too strong to resist any longer. “This is driven by compassion. I’m tired of Republican, Democrat politics; I’m tired of blowhard radio people, blowhard television people, blowhard newspapers,” said New York State Senator Roy McDonald, a Saratoga banker, a Republican and a Vietnam War combat veteran, as he announced he’d switch his vote despite heavy pressure from party bosses and conservative activists to not do so. “They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background, I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.”
The political climate is such that Republicans have been angling to avoid making 2012 a repeat of 2004, when a nationwide debate over social issues was a major undercurrent in the successful re-election of George W. Bush. That year, GOP strategists helped boost turnout by coordinating winning efforts in 11 states to amend state constitutions to ban gay marriage. Instead, as political scientist Larry Sabato told TIME this week, most of the major GOP contenders for the presidency in 2012 would rather be known for where they stand on the economy than for making gay marriage a do-or-die issue. “Gay rights has become a flash point on the Republican side,” he said. “As you saw in [the June 13 CNN] debate, most candidates repeat the social conservative mantra, ‘Marriage should be between one man and one woman.’ But the mainstream big players like Romney are hesitant to go further. There is an increasingly assertive libertarian wing of the GOP that says, ‘Keep government out of the bedroom.’
“(See pictures of gay youth speaking out.)
With the changing tenor of the political debate, marriage equality has made gains, says Michael Klarman, a Harvard professor who has long studied the way courts help usher in powerful social change — usually ahead of public opinion. He said the courts helped set the table for changes like the gay rights developments in recent years, but it’s no surprise that as public opinion changes, votes like the new New York legislation and — eventually — up-or down popular votes will follow in order to expand on those gains. “It’s really been amazing to see how fast this transformation has taken place, especially this year,” Klarman told TIME. “You’ve seen the wealthy Wall Street conservatives — perhaps at the behest of Bloomberg, begin weighing in in favor of gay marriage. You’ve seen the public awareness campaigns by professional athletes and the president of the Phoenix Suns come out. Watching this, it has made me think what it must have been like in the 1960s as all the Civil Rights changes began to take place.”
He said a vote like the one in New York lawmakers was inevitable, and that it will quickly join the swell in favor of gay marriage already rising in other areas of the country. Those changes were on full view in California last week, as first a federal judge rejected efforts to vacate last year’s landmark ruling in favor of gay marriage by Chief District Judge Vaughn Walker, and then when a panel of federal bankruptcy judges unanimously agreed that federal laws that insist upon treating married gay couples differently than straight couples are unconstitutional. “I have a feeling that these people manning the walls against gay marriage are going to wake up in 50 years and realize they were in the same position that southern whites were in when they rallied in the 1950s to defend white supremacy,” Klarman told TIME.
Meanwhile, Klarman said both sides in the marriage debate err when they cast their issue in libertarian terms, as Dolan did this week. Saying the government has no role in marriage is foolish, he said, whether you’re trying to argue for or against gay marriage. “Of course we want the government to set the rules for marriage,” Klarman told TIME. “We have always depended on the government to do just that, and nobody would argue we don’t want the government setting the rules that say 12 year olds can’t marry or that brothers and sisters can’t marry. Gay marriage is simply not a libertarian issue.”
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