In New York, Democrats hold a shaky 32-to-30 majority in the Senate, and some senators oppose allowing the legislation to come to the floor for a vote.
Those who favor the bill say they realize they are risking another significant defeat but are determined to get legislators on record on the issue. They also say that now may be the best time to push lawmakers to take up the bill, given that next year all 212 members of the Legislature will face re-election.
Estimates vary, but supporters of the bill believe they can count on about 25 votes for the legislation at this time.
“The stakes are much higher now, following Maine, and it would be an enormous boost to the movement to prevail in New York,” said Matt Foreman, a gay rights advocate who has served as the head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Empire State Pride Agenda, New York’s leading gay rights group.
But, he added, “if we don’t win marriage in New York in this special session, it’s going to be a very hard lift next year.”Schubert said he had an ah-ha moment in California when a focus group watched a campaign commercial featuring a Massachusetts couple who described how their 7-year-old son came home from school and explained that a man can marry another man, something he learned in a children's book.
One of the members of the focus group shook his head, and Schubert asked the moderator to inquire. The participant said he would be angry if something like that that happened to his kids.
"So that was sort of a light-bulb moment, that this education issue was really going to be a powerful one for us," said Schubert, who with Flint was named the "public affairs team of the year" for 2009 by the American Association of Political Consultants.
In California and Maine, gay marriage supporters countered the claims with spots featuring prominent elected officials such as California's chief of public instruction and Maine's attorney general, who both insisted that same-sex marriage had nothing to do with schools.
But the issue persisted, according to advocates on both sides, in part because gay marriage supporters failed to discuss a key fact: Many public schools already have lessons that refer to gay families in the younger grades and confront anti-gay discrimination for older students.
Although the topics usually are broached in the context of appreciating diversity and tolerance, for some parents any discussion of gay people is too close to talking about gay sex.
Here's the reality: this is fear baiting. The same people who find it repugnant that two men or two women love each other tend to be peopl who find inter-racial marriage repugnant.
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So the answer? I'm working on the article called "A Call to Arms...of Love". Love will trump fear.
Pace!
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When Prop 8 passed, we couldn't go anywhere—not to our local coffee shop or sandwich stand, to the bank or to the market—without looking at every single face and wondering "Did you vote against our marriage?" You too will wake up tomorrow with this same vulnerable distrust for your neighbors; you too will wake up tomorrow knowing that the majority of your state deems you unworthy of first-class citizenship. It is a weight heavier than any shoulders are meant to bear.
But here's the very fine silver lining: You will also wake up in the coming days to a support group you may not have known you had. Many of your neighbors, coworkers, family and friends will stand up to rally behind you. They will hold candles at vigils and wave signs in protest; they will say they never thought that Question 1 would pass; they will say they wish they had done more, and they will be ready to do so. Much of the country will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you, as they have done for us in California, to say that discrimination will not stand and that you do not stand alone. Maine will wake up to a new state of disharmony, where it is crystal clear that not all citizens are equal under the law.
As a North Carolinian, living in a second class citizenship status, I found this silver lining heartening.
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Pace!
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Second, call this campaign against us what it is - Gay Apartheid.
Refuse to allow any of our fellow Americans, President Obama or our allies to view this as a political issue who time hasn't quite come. America is in the process of creating a system of Gay Apartheid. We will not quietly sit and accept it. All over the place, this nation is creating one set of laws for LGBT Americans and another set for all other Americans. That is the classic definition of Apartheid. Either our political allies are for Gay Apartheid or against it. If they are against it, they must fight with us and no longer duck like President Obama did in Maine and Washington. There is no half way in fighting Apartheid.
Today many will claim that we must surrender the word marriage or accept some sort of separate but equal arrangement. It didn't work in the African-American struggle for freedom and it doesn't work for us. We want full equality with the same rights, benefits and privileges as all other Americans now. We say to those friends, allies and even in our own community who want to accept that second class citizenship, "Oh No You Don't!" We will accept no compromises, time-lines, incremental approaches with our freedom. Don't counsel patience as if this is a new issue. We have been fighting these ballot box bigots for over three decades. Enough.
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Pace!
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