NY Gay Marriage Bill Moves To Senate For Vote-Gay Enemies say The Votes r there to Pass it
ReIf Ipublic the New York Senate agreed Friday to allow a full vote on legalizing gay marriage, setting the stage for By REID J. EPSTEIN
New York’s state senate is poised to approve same-sex marriage Friday night, paving the way for the Empire State to become the sixth and by far largest state to allow gays and lesbians to wed.
The senate’s GOP majority leader, Dean Skelos, announced Friday afternoon that he will call a vote on the legislation. It will be “a vote of conscience for every member of the Senate,” he said in a press release. Half the chamber — 31 members — have said publicly that they will vote for the legislation. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a first-year Democrat who campaigned on legalizing same-sex marriage, has been negotiating with several moderate Republicans to secure their votes the last two weeks.
“After many hours of deliberation and discussion over the past several weeks among the members, it has been decided that same sex marriage legislation will be brought to the full Senate for an up or down vote,” Skelos said in the press release.
It was not immediately clear what time a vote would take place.
A GOP senator, who declined to speak publicly because of an agreement not to disclose internal party discussions, told POLITICO that senators did not discuss how they would vote during a nearly 10-hour conference meeting Friday. The senator said some members of the conference wanted to send the matter to a statewide referendum, though they lost out to those who wanted to hold a vote tonight, effectively to bring the matter to a close.
The senator said the Republicans who remain publicly undecided — Mark Grisanti of Buffalo and Stephen Saland of Poughkeepsie — did not reveal how they would vote to the conference.
Advocates on either side of the issue predicted earlier this week that New York’s deliberations would impact the fate of same-sex marriage in other states where legalizing the practice is on the table.
“New York’s a big deal,” said James Esseks,” the director of the ACLU’s LGBT Project. “It more than doubles the population that lives in states with the freedom to marry. … And in terms of cultural relevance to the rest of the country, it’s huge.”
President Barack Obama, at a Thursday fundraising stop in New York City, told a group of 600 gay and lesbian supporters that “gay and lesbian couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country” but stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriage.
Mike Long, the powerful New York State Conservative Party chairman who was the most vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, told The Weekly Standard Friday afternoon the legislation has enough votes to pass.
“I know they’ve got the 32nd vote, and I think they’ve muscled two more people” to vote for it, he said.
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