Both houses ofthe NewHampshire legislature have approved gay marriage legislation. It now goes to Governor Lynch to sign. Like most Democrats, he has opposed gay marriage in the past, but there is some expectation that he will sign the bill, since his party politicked so hard for it. Similarly, the issue is before the Maine legislature. Democratic governor Baldacci has also not mentioned his stance on it, but one thinks that if it makes it through the lege, he will sign it.
We may be at a sort of national turning point on this issue. Gay marriage is becoming an issue that Democrats feel they can support in blue states without fear of electoral backlash against them. It will be quite a thing for presidential politics if BOTH New Hampshire and Iowa have legal gay marriage in 2012.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
More Gay Marriage News
Posted by The Law Talking Guy at 4:33 PM
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4 comments:
That's fantastic! Let's hope he signs it pronto, and as many other states as possible decide they want to join in...
This is great news. I certainly hope that the Iowa court rule proves to be a national turning point. Iowa gave Obama the first boost into "electability", next we may have given the country an excuse to tolerate gay marriage. For our next trick we will fix the environment with our economically viable wind turbines. ;-)
Iowa Update:
So far about half of the counties in Iowa have issued marriage licenses to same sex couples. The big concentrations are in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (not surprising). But there have been many licenses issues in remote rural counties too. So far, not one county official has refused to issue such a license. One county is refusing to give any private details about who they issues licenses to until the marriages take place (there is a 3 day waiting period in Iowa so that county's info will be public by the end of the week I believe).
Not only are the public officials universally complying with the new legal status quo here but there have been no significant protests against the marriages... no clusters of angry Christian Fundamentalists or anything like that. Really, this is turning in a non-event here in Iowa which is a GREAT thing in my opinion. Intolerance dies with a shrug not a scream.
Just as a technical note, it is not quite over in NH legislature--their House has to re-pass the bill as their Senate made some changes. This is not quite trivial since the amendment required to pass the bill in the Senate (it passed by a single vote) was an amendment defeated in the House--so there is some disagreement here. The Senate bill says explicitly that priests and other religious folk in New Hampshire are not required to perform gay ceremonies if they don't want to--it won't count as discrimination to say no.
The amendment was defeated by people who think it's totally unnecessary and almost justifies the scare tactics of the right (Run! Hide! they're gonna make priests perform gay marriages!!!). I think the NH House will swallow the amendment and get it done.
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