Tag: gay marriage

Most of the state’s papers have said this about the three abstaining Democrats, but I think Al Doblin puts it best — because he reminds readers that Sen. Steven Sweeney is about to take over as senate president. Voting no was bad enough — and there were 20 who did so — but abstaining was the height of cowardice that no apology can offset.

State Republican Chairman Jay Weber sent out this statement today on the state Senate’s wrong-headed vote on same-sex marriage:

“From the beginning, Republicans have opposed legislative and judicial efforts to redefine marriage in New Jersey and called for any changes to be put on the ballot for voters to decide. We believe that the majority of New Jerseyans agree with that position, and following the failure of this bill in today’s Senate vote, I am heartened to see that the Senate has respected the will of the people.”

Back in the early 1960s, marriage was defined as not only being between a man and a woman, but interracial marriages were against the law in many states. And the bulk of Americans probably wanted it to stay that way.

Forty years have passed and there are few today — aside from a couple of recalcitrant southerners — who would seek to take us back to that point.

But let’s go back there for a minute — at least intellectually — and ask the question that Weber’s statement raises: Should the lifting of the ban on interracial marriage have been “put on the ballots for voters to decide”? Of course not.

So, why should same-sex marriage be put to a referendum?

The Senate, unfortunately, has allowed conservative religious leaders and their political acolytes to elevate the strictures of their belief system above those of the rest of the state’s citizens, which does a disservice to gays and lesbians and anyone who disagrees with the conservative religious position.

I’ve said for a long time that the best approach, legally, might be to remove the word marriage from the statute book and replace it with some other legal construct and leave marriage to the realm of religion. I understand the cultural attachment to the word, but I just can’t see how we’re going to get past this without taking the debate in a new direction.

Any thoughts?

Moderate Republicans are looking for compromise on the gay marriage issue by proposing to strengthen the civil unions law to make it more difficult for it to be ignored.

The problem is that the only way to strengthen civil unions is to allow same-sex marriage or to remove the word marriage from the statute books altogether, turning all marriages into civil unions. Tweaking what has proven to be a flawed compromise with an equally flawed compromise is just a waste of time.

Marriage equality now.

I just received a robocall from Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage, the homophobic group opposed to marriage equality, that purported to be a survey but was really just a push poll designed to drum up opposition to same-sex marriage before Thursday’s Senate vote.

I hung up. Maybe I should have taken the poll and skewed its results.