Gay marriage battle reaches New York

In a testament to the pathetic state of our national media, I found this on an Australian news network:

The battle over gay marriage in the United States has
spread to a small town in New York state whose mayor has began marrying
same-sex couples in the first such ceremonies in the state. The
weddings in the village of New Paltz, about 130 kilometres north of
Manhattan, come as California's Attorney-General plans to ask that
state's Supreme Court to rule on the legality of over 3,300 gay
weddings in the past two weeks in San Francisco. New Paltz Mayor Jason
West has married couples in a festive atmosphere outside Village Hall
in what the 26-year-old official describes as "legal marriage
ceremonies". Mr West has so far officiated at 19 gay weddings.
Some 200 people cheered and held up placards saying: "Congratulations"
and "Bush Get Out of My Bedroom," while a much smaller group of
protesters held signs saying: "Gay Marriage is Morally Wrong" and "Pray
for Them." Mr West ended each ceremony saying, "By the powers vested in
me by the state of New York, I now declare you legally wed".
New York's Department of State says in a statement it defines marriage
as a union "of one man and one woman" and that anyone marrying a gay
couple "would be violating state law and (be) subject to the penalties
in law."

The "battle" against gay marriage is officially over. Bush's Hate Amendment has no chance
of passing through the Senate, and it's just a matter of time until
public opinion has come around.
The most easily drawn parallel is between gay marriage and interracial
marriage. As I noted in a previous post, 8 years before Loving vs.
Virginia made miscegenation legal 94% of white Americans opposed
black/white weddings. Today, anyone espousing that viewpoint is treated
like a bottom-dwelling moron, and rightfully so. One day, my children
will find it inconceivable that anyone could be so small-minded as to
oppose such a thing as gay marriage.
The couples getting married at San Francisco's City Hall provided
America with the watershed event that turned the tide of public
opinion. When people saw the images of those weddings, it became
impossible to pretend that gay marriage was about some twisted sex act.
San Francisco showed us that marriage is about love, not genitalia.
Men and women, blacks and whites, gay men and gay women all have the
right to marry whomever they choose. Accepting gay marriage is just one
more step on the way to equality in America. Throughout the course of
history, it's been shown again and again that all it takes is a few
people to initiate an unstoppable change that ripples throughout
society.

It must be that the increase comes of the inborn human
instinct to imitate--that and man's commenest weakness, his aversion to
being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the
unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the
commanding feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000. I am not
offering this as a discovery; privately the dullest of us knows it to
be true. History will not allow us to forget or ignore this supreme
trait of our character. It persistently and sardonically reminds us
that from the beginning of the world no revolt against a public infamy
or oppression has ever been begun but by the one daring man in the
10,000, the rest timidly waiting, and slowly and reluctantly joining,
under the influence of that man and his fellows from the other ten
thousands. The abolitionists remember. Privately the public feeling was
with them early, but each man was afraid to speak out until he got some
hint that his neighbor was privately as he privately felt himself. Then
the boom followed. It always does. -- Mark Twain, THE UNITED STATES OF LYNCHERDOM (1901)

Posted by flow Frazao on February 27, 2004 at 09:27 PM | Permalink