I am a very happy camper right now. From the New York Times:
Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed, and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.
The same-sex marriage bill was approved on a 33-to-29 vote, as 4 Republican state senators joined 29 Democrats in voting for the bill. The Senate galleries were so packed with supporters and opponents that the fire marshals closed them off. […]
Supporters of the measure described the victory in New York as especially symbolic — and poignant — because of its rich place in the history of gay rights: the movement’s foundational moment, in June of 1969, was a riot against police inside the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the West Village.
On Friday night, as the Senate voted, a crowd jammed into the Stonewall Inn, where televisions were tuned to the Senate hours before the vote began. Danny Garvin, 62, said he had been at the bar the night of the riot, and came back to watch the Senate debate Friday. On the streets where police beat gay men in 1969, on Friday crowds cheered, as police quietly stood watch. Bernie Janelle, 53, turned to her partner of 16 years, Cindy Hearing, and said, “I’m going to propose to her on Sunday.”
Rachel Maddow pointed out on her twitter feed that this more or less doubles the number of Americans living in areas with marriage equality.
Transgendered people on the other hand aren’t so happy:
http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/and-what-would-enactment-of-genda-do-for-the-number-of-trans-people-covered-by-legitimate-civil-rights-laws/
Except, perhaps, for trans people in NY who wanted to get married to their partners, weren’t able to, and now will be able to. Every trans friend I have is pro-SSM; I don’t think that transgendered people universally share a single view on the SSM question.
I don’t agree with lesbian or gay activists who suggest that we should exclude trans people from hate crimes legislation so that lesbians and gays can get their rights faster. And I don’t agree with trans people who suggest we should oppose SSM so that trans people can get their rights faster.
I’m crying right now. My partner is in London. He’s asleep and won’t hear the news until his morning. I’ll see him in a week, but I’ll be leaving my own country to go back to him. We’d like to be in the States, but he can’t get a visa. In Britain, we have full legal rights. Not here. This victory, perhaps, gets us a little bit closer.
Awesome. Just wonderful. I was hoping and hoping that the NY Senate would manage to do the right thing.
Grace
Today, I am proud to be a New Yorker. This is just fantastic news.
I also thought that Stonewall was a pretty transgender bar as far as gay bars went. Probably more LGBT than just LGB, or just T.
Proud to be a former NYer. This is great news — and hopefully puts more pressure on other “blue” states to catch up with humanity.
Still frustrated as a current ORer. Way past time to repeal the constitutional (deserves irony quotes) ban on same sex marriage here.
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I didn’t hear the news until today because I was out celebrating my 10th anniversary last night. I am so, so pleased to share the date with this event.
Amp: It’s not about opposing gay marriage, it’s just that transgender people are tired that the issue dominates glbt rights rather than ENDA:
http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/of-course-it-all-depends-on-how-the-question-is-framed/
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/06/gay-marriage-push-is-negatively.html
If you google ‘marriage equality’ right now, you get a little rainbow at the end of the google search bar. If you google same sex marriage, you don’t get a rainbow.
Googling “marriage equality google rainbow” I discovered that it actually google secretly celebrating Gay Pride Month.
Anyway…
Kevin,
Next year is the year! (If you are in Oregon, go, sign up. BRO needs to know it has enough backing to win this thing. They will make a final decision on whether 2012 is the year this August). [Oh, the other main drive that BRO is doing currently? Working to end health care discrimination against transgender communities. We’ve already got gender identity inclusive ENDA.]
Jenny,
The fact that New York LGB organizations supported (and the leg passed) an ENDA without gender identity protection back in 2002 sucks and it is past time that was fixed. I don’t agree with blaming the fight for marriage equality for the fact that anti-marriage equality forces have made the already equivocal marriage rights of trans people marginally worse (which is what I read the trans-griot post you linked to to say), and it certainly seems to me that marriage equality where it is achieved benefits transsexual and transgendered people over the status-quo ante, as it entirely removes the question of which sex you legally are from the question of whether you can marry.
A former Alas commenter Qgrrl agreed with your feeling that ENDA (and housing non-discrimination laws) are more important than marriage equality and that the focus on marriage equality has delayed ENDA implementation (I think I agree on the former, but not on the later). My experience with Oregon doesn’t support that (the later), since an inclusive ENDA was passed here in Oregon pretty much in direct response to the passage of an anti-marriage equality constitutional amendment, but I don’t know anywhere near enough of the history of pushes for ENDA and marriage equality overall to say anything with any certainty.
Certainly, the push for ENDA (including gender identity inclusive ENDA) has been way more successful than the push for marriage equality so far. 50% of the population has non-inclusive ENDA and 36% has inclusive ENDA, versus 10% having marriage equality (Oregon only got ENDA in 2007, so I suspect that it mostly happened over the same period that marriage equality has been being pushed for, but that is just a guess). We even have a Supreme Court decision forbidding states from banning smaller governmental units from passing ENDA.
Going by HRC’s list of laws, here are the first three I checked: Colorado was also 2007, Connecticut was pre-2000, Delaware was 2009 (but non-inclusive). That certainly looks like it is an active and ongoing process running in parallel to the push for marriage equality (and I’m betting that Colorado was similar to Oregon, with the loss on marriage equality in 2006 serving as an impetus for a victory on ENDA, a sort of “Well, we won’t let you marry, but we want to show we aren’t bigots,” mentality).
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I like same-legal-sex marriage, don’t get me wrong, but, to quote Zoe Brainwho has more of a hand in the issue on the ground than I:
“I hope I’m being paranoid… but the language of the bill doesn’t allow either Intersex or Trans marriages.
It has the same kind of language as with sex discrimination in Chapter VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964.
You can’t stop someone from marrying either a man or a woman, just because they are men or women. It’s not prohibited to stop them from marrying someone who’s Intersex or Trans, just because they are Intersex or Trans.
Since GENDA was shelved for the fourth time this year, it can even be plausibly argued that this was by legislative intent.
Woods vs CG Studios is applicable caselaw.”
So yeah… marriage equality, just like housing and employment equality. We shall see.
Charles:
The HRC continually ignores the issue of inclusive ENDA though:
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2007/10/why-transgender-community-hates-hrc.html
http://endablog.wordpress.com/category/human-rights-campaign/
Jenny,
The trans-griot post is from 2007. HRC certainly made a mess of things in the 2007 attempt to pass ENDA, waffling on whether a non-inclusive ENDA met their approval. In 2007, my recollection is that a sufficient outcry against HRC’s betrayal that made it clear that HRC did not speak for the LGBT community on this. In 2009 and 2011 an inclusive ENDA was introduced to congress. My list of which ENDAs were inclusive and which were non-inclusive came from HRC. HRC never explicitly supported dropping gender identity from ENDA, and has always claimed to support including gender identity, but I certainly don’t trust them to do so when it matters most.
Nonetheless, gender identity inclusive ENDAs have been passed in numerous states in the past decade (more than have passed non-inclusive ENDAs), and there seems to be a consensus that when a national ENDA passes, it will be gender identity inclusive (I suspect that there are more legislators who would reject a non-inclusive ENDA because it was non-inclusive than there are legislators who would vote for it because it was non-inclusive).
Certainly, it sucks that HRC can’t be trusted at all on trans issues (and as the other rant you linked to points out, it’s not as though trans inclusion is the only problem with HRC). On the other hand, they were kind enough to publish a list of which states have ENDA and which don’t, and whether those ENDAs are non-inclusive, implicitly inclusive by court ruling, or explicitly inclusive, and (at least for some states) what year ENDA was passed, which was what I was trying to find out, so I hope you’ll excuse me for linking to them (which was the only way I can see that they entered the conversation).
Okay,thanks Charles.Sorry for being so cross.
There were two GLBT bills – or rather, one GLB bill and one T bill – passed by the Assembly in New York. They were of supposedly equal priority.
SSM had 30 votes, 6 uncommitted in the Senate. GENDA had 32 votes, 8 uncommitted in the Senate. Enough to pass.
One had a “full court press” to get it through. The other – nothing. No support from any NY GLB(t) organisation, they were too busy with SSM.
It’s not the betrayal in 2002 that’s the only issue. It’s the betrayals in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, each time GENDA was stuck in a Senate committee after passing the house.
Now Empire State Pride Agenda has announced their priority next year is…. repeal of DOMA! They’ll do GENDA when that’s over, promise. OK, and after implementing DADT repeal so only Trans people still get excluded from service of course. And after GLBs have the right to march in the St Patrick’s day parade. That’s what they’re concentrating on now in Massachussetts, where their GENDA has been languishing for 22 years, and they’ve had SSM for 7.
You know, the important stuff.
Thanks Zoe, I didn’t know that about either Mass or NY.
It definitely shows the critical importance of getting ENDA right the first time. If NY hadn’t gotten a non-inclusive ENDA in 2002, there is no way in Hell that it wouldn’t have gotten an inclusive ENDA by now. There are some half-measures that are better than no measure, and that serve as steps towards a full measure. A non-inclusive ENDA isn’t one of them.
Supposedly, Governor Cuomo has made noises about pushing for GENDA next legislative session. Who knows if it does any good, but I emailed him just now to ask him to please follow through on that. As you say, GENDA could have passed it the Republicans in the senate had been shamed into letting it out of committee. We now know Cuomo can do that.