NY Gay Marriage Bill to Come to Senate Floor

As I type, the procrastinating prigs who call themselves the Republicans in our state Senate have finally stopped stalling and are bringing the gay marriage bill to the floor. I say procrastinating, because that's all this hullaballoo about protecting religious institutions from being compelled to perform gay marriages ever was.

Consider: Suppose a Catholic priest on Staten Island is asked to perform a gay marriage, and refuses. Suppose the gay couple then brings suit in the New York Supreme Court for Richmond County, requesting that the priest be compelled to perform the ceremony. Want to know what happens then? The Archdiocese of New York offers a First Amendment defense, saying that the Church cannot be compelled by the state or the federal government to perform any ceremony.

The Church would win in a landslide. NO court in this state, or any other state of the union, is going to decide that a religious institution can be compelled to perform any rite or ceremony if the institution expressly refuses to do so. And I seriously doubt any lawyer in this state would even represent the gay couple in trying, because the argument that they COULD compel the Church to ratify their union fails to pass an intricate legal test which we lawyers call "the straight-face test." (For that matter, I have a really hard time believing that any gay couple could be so abysmally stupid as to even desire to try to compel the Church to accept them, especially when they can go to St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Richmondtown and be welcomed with open arms.)

With this analysis in mind, the state GOP's insistence that addition language protecting the clergy and Knights of Columbus halls and other nonsense is revealed as a bunch of useless hype which only served as a delaying tactic. Governor Cuomo called 'bullshit' on that by bringing the legislature back for an extra week, during which time they debated every trivial bill, including the naming of a state vegetable, to avoid actually tackling the one substantive issue that might actually cost people votes come the fall. And finally, sometime this evening, the vote will be taken.

Some time ago, I opined that civil unions constituted an equitable compromise between liberal and conservative viewpoints on this issue. I said that, in the final analysis, I favored gay marriage, but that I thought that CUs were more achievable in the short term while still granting all the substantive rights of marriage to homosexuals; we'd just use a different term to keep Pat Robertson from screaming so loud. I can't say I blame gay rights activists for refusing to settle, and I admit that I forgot Commodore Maury's old axiom:

When principle is involved, be deaf to expediency.

The Russell Record congratulates the gay community of New York in achieving equal rights in marital law, and the New York Legislature for finally doing its job.