Gaining Ground

The New York State Assembly approved legislation last night to make New York the sixth state...that's right, sixth...to allow same-sex marriage. And if you had any doubts that the times, they are a'changing, notice that many who voted against marriage equality in 2007 have since changed their votes. The final vote was 89 to 52, including five Republicans. Indeed!

“The margin of victory and the balance of where the people come from who voted for this is broadening,” said Daniel J. O’Donnell, a Democratic assemblyman from the Upper West Side who led the effort in the Assembly to gain support for the bill. “The state is demanding that we provide equality, and that’s the message here.”

Say it again: the message is equality. Simple enough, huh?

One anti-equality group calls itself, oddly enough, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms. Now, i may be wrong, but we're fighting for equal rights guaranteed us under the constitution and an anti-gay-marriage group is calling itself Constitutional Freedoms? Madness.

And despite [pressure from the so-called freedoms groups, two Republicans spoke out about why they dropped their opposition to granting same-sex couples the right to marry.

“There’s that little voice inside of you that tells you when you’ve done something right, and when you’ve done something wrong,” said Fred W. Thiele Jr., a Republican who represents the Hamptons. “That vote just never felt right to me. That little voice kept gnawing away at me.”

It is simply about doing what is right, and fair, and equal, under the law.