Posted on 06/30/2009 10:36:38 AM PDT by neverdem
New York's annual Gay Pride parade was a colorful celebration of 40 years of progress toward civil rights for gays, but once the dust settled, gay couples who wish to marry in New York state remain thwarted.
A bill to legalize gay marriage in the state that saw the dawn of the gay rights movement is mired in political stalemate in the state capital Albany, where Democrats and Republicans are battling over control of the state Senate.
"I had hoped today's march would have been a bit of a wedding march. It's not," Christine Quinn, the gay speaker of the New York City Council, said at Sunday's Gay Pride parade. Held annually, this year's event marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York's Greenwich Village, which triggered the modern U.S. gay rights movement.
"We are disappointed. ... But I know there have been other times our community has been disappointed and you need to keep fighting," Quinn said at the start of the parade, which organizers said drew more than a million people.
Gay couples can marry in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa and will be allowed marry in Vermont starting in September and in New Hampshire from January. Other states offer same-sex unions that grant many of the same rights as marriage.
Forty-two U.S. states explicitly prohibit gay marriage, including 29 with constitutional amendments, according to Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group.
In May, the New York state Assembly, where Democrats hold a majority, voted by a wide margin to legalize gay marriage.
On June 8, state Senate Republicans engineered a coup by getting two Democrats to switch allegiance and vote in a new leadership, effectively erasing the slim 32-30 majority the Democrats won in the November 2008 election.
But Democrats have refused to recognize...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
No bias there. Nope. None at all...
Good.
Power struggle? Yeah, seems many New Yorkers don’t want it, as they’ve indicated in the past, and a few are struggling to force them to write it into law. Yeah, I guess it is a struggle...
Let’s see.
42 with it explicitly banned. That leaves:
Iowa, NH, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts. That’s 5.
Leaves 2 states. Maine and Delaware? That’s it. I had been wondering about the recent flurry, and it makes total sense now.
Have to get that 29 much higher, the battle will be with those states with it explicitly prohibited, and the further expansion of gay marriage.
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