As the insanity in Albany continues, the question for marriage equality for the past 24 hours has been: Whither Sen. Tom Duane?
Duane, openly gay, has been the leading marriage equality proponent in the Senate. As people realized that Sen. Espada, a co-sponsor of the marriage equality bill, was being given a leadership position in the “power-sharing” arrancement under the new leadership, party labels appeared to diminish in importance and people went back to, “Will a vote be called?”
Quickly thereafter, people also realized that Sen. Duane has been laying low since the coup. As PolitickerNY reported Wednesday, people began speculating that Duane was considering voting for the Skelos-Espada leadership team in exchange for a vote on the marriage equality bill.
Also, the Gay City News reported:
When asked if he could dispel stories that the GOP had reached out to him, [Duane] responded, “I have spoken to people on both sides of the aisle about seeing every issue accomplished that I have spent my whole life working to accomplish.”
So, another day, another question, another possibility for marriage equality . . .
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In related news, stats wunderkind Nate Silver looks at a question mentioned previously at Law Dork: how the wording of marriage questions can dramatically alter the results.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Chris Geidner is the award-winning senior political editor at D.C.'s Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, The American Prospect, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications, as well as at his blog, Law Dork. In 2011, he received the Excellence in News Writing Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his coverage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal. Prior to moving to D.C. in 2009, he served as an attorney on the senior staff at the Ohio Attorney General's Office and had earlier worked for a leading Columbus law firm. An extended biography can be found
I don’t think Nate addresses the rather important difference underlying the difference between Permit and Prohibit:
“Permit” implies that the government inherently has a role, and thus refers to marriage in the legal sense, which is inherently public and enforceable on others who would not submit voluntarily.
“Prohibit” implies that this is something people could do in the absence of the government — that it is, as Nate says, a “negative right” — and thus refers to marriage in the religious or otherwise social sense, which can be private and is not enforceable on others.
The fact that marriage is tied to religion creates confusion around the term. If you asked my parents’ Baptist neighbor, “Should the government be able to prohibit marriages performed between two people of the same sex?” he’d probably think, “Well, I don’t want to see such marriages, but I don’t want the government marching into the Episcopalians’ church to bust up those commitment ceremonies they’ve been having,” and he’d say, “No.” If you asked him if the government should permit two people of the same sex to marry, and he thought, “Well, I don’t want to required under the law to say that Adam and Steve are married when I know they aren’t in the eyes of the Lord,” he’d say, “No.”