Add a comment This has been a huge week for legislative action on a range of sexual rights – both at the local and national level (marriage equality measures passing in Washington State and Kalamazoo, Michigan, and going down in Maine; strict abortion funding restrictions going into the health care reform bill in DC while the bill included a provision that would remove the tax penalty for lesbian and gay employees who include their partners in their health insurance). Each of these votes has been framed in the media and by some activists as a watershed moment for the rights and issues at stake, whether it be same sex marriage or abortion rights. But, of course, that’s wrong. With each of those votes we’re seeing politics at work, the dialectic back and forth of legislatures and the voting public responding to an evolving notion of justice and fairness.
Today the New York State Senate is likely to take some action on the marriage equality bill. The bill already passed the Assembly and we’ve been waiting for the (typically dysfunctional) state Senate to take up the issue. Because Governor Paterson put the bill on the agenda yesterday, some sort of action is required by law, though this need not necessarily be an up or down vote on the issue. Most Albany watchers don’t see the votes necessary to get the bill passed, and the vote in Maine last week didn’t help those New York State senators who were on the fence or feared getting out ahead of their electorate. To make matters worse, yesterday the National Organization for Marriage threatened GOP New York senators that it will fund a primary challenge against any senator who votes for marriage equality. Radical right saber rattling didn’t help in an upstate New York congressional race last week when Sarah Palin and the tea baggers tried to sway the race away from a republican candidate who was eclectically conservative in favor a right wing nut who didn’t even live in the district, but it might this time.
The New York marriage equality bill may not pass today, and many will proclaim that this is the nail in the coffin for same-sex couples’ marriage rights, following on the heels of the Maine vote last week. But this won’t be true. To frame victory as “winning the vote the first time it comes up” is a short-sighted and narrow way to understand what this civil rights struggle, like any other really, is about. With the vantage point of only a little bit of distance from this week’s events, we can see a tide rolling in the direction of marriage equality insofar as the bill passed the New York Assembly, the Governor has put it on the top of his legislative agenda, and the bill has finally made its way to the Senate. If it goes down today we’ll introduce it again. And again. And again. That’s how almost all legislative advances have been won for lgbt people – not the first time, usually not the second or third time, but eventually the injustice of it seems too much to bear and the expansion of the law become inevitable if not overdue. We may not be there yet, but it will come. Indeed the change in public sentiment on this issue has come much faster than I would ever have predicted. If nothing else, cohort replacement will accomplish this civil rights revolution, since younger people support same sex-marriage rights in far greater numbers than do the aging boomers, as Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips so clearly demonstrated in their study of the evolving attitudes of the general public on gay rights issues.
What I find much more troubling is the rather substantial erosion of public support for the reproductive rights of women that the House’s vote on Saturday night signalled. More on that next.
