It's About Time! Part 2 (apologies to Bitchboy)

[Rick Munroe]

[h2]Pataki Signs Law Protecting Rights of Gays[/h2]

(Here's the full story from nytimes.com by SHAILA K. DEWAN:)

ALBANY, Dec. 17 — Thirty-one years after the first gay rights bill was introduced in Albany, Gov. George E. Pataki today signed into law a bill extending civil rights protections to gays and lesbians in the state — hours after the Republican-led State Senate mustered the votes to approve it.

 

Supporters of the bill said it would protect thousands of people from discrimination in housing, employment, credit and public accommodations.

 

With the governor's signature, New York became the 13th state to include gays and lesbians in its civil rights law. Despite its liberal reputation, the state has not been in the vanguard of efforts to extend equal legal status to homosexuals, lagging in passing legislation such as hate-crime laws that cover gays.

 

Other states have gone farther. Vermont allows same-sex civil unions, and Hawaii has a strong domestic partnership law. Today a high-ranking lawmaker in Connecticut said he expected his state would take up the subject of same-sex marriage next year.

 

Today's Senate vote was one of the few in recent history where the outcome could not be predicted with certainty. Onlookers packed the gallery to see whether the bill, which essentially adds only two words, "sexual orientation," to existing anti-discrimination law, would pass.

 

As soon as the bill's approval was announced, supporters on the Senate floor rushed to embrace lawmakers like Senator Tom Duane and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, who are gay. The Democrat-led Assembly has passed the bill 10 years in a row.

 

In the halls of the Capitol after the vote, Governor Pataki said: "It's not upstate, downstate, Republican, Democrat, black, white, straight, gay. We are one New York and I think the passage of this bill is another important step in the confirmation of that."

 

At 6:30 p.m., a little more than three hours after the vote, he signed the bill into law.

 

The vote, 34 to 26, was not as close as lobbyists on both sides of the issue were predicting only an hour before the debate. Governor Pataki made calls late into Monday evening trying to persuade both Republican and Democratic lawmakers to vote yes.

 

But with only eight Republicans on board by midday, the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, the man who had kept the issue from a floor vote for eight years, helped put it over the top by making a last-minute appeal to his Republican colleagues, his senior aides said. On Monday he had said he would not cajole his members to vote any particular way.

 

Thirteen of 36 Republicans and 21 of 24 Democrats voted for the bill.

 

Senator Bruno, viewed by many conservatives as the ballast that keeps state government from sliding to the left, had shifted his position on the bill as part of what is tacitly acknowledged, even by Senator Bruno's senior aides, to have been a deal to win an endorsement for Governor Pataki from the state's largest gay rights group, the Empire State Pride Agenda.

 

Senator Bruno had not promised to vote for the bill, but today he rose to his feet and urged his colleagues to vote yes with him, saying that its time had come.

 

"Maybe I have become more enlightened," Senator Bruno said. "But over the years I have felt that the present nondiscrimination laws in this state were more than adequate." The fact that there are "such strong feelings out there that this is necessary," he said, convinced him otherwise.

 

"I am going to vote for this legislation to express tolerance, anti-discrimination, and just to recognize that people have the right to live their lives as they see fit," he said.

 

Still, after the measure passed, the Senate did not issue a press release, as it did for a second measure it passed today, reducing the legal blood alcohol limit for drivers to .08 percent from .10 to comply with federal policy.

 

All morning, the Capitol was crawling with advocates for and against the bill. There were Catholic lobbyists, who said the act was "well-intentioned" but could lead to the legalization of same-sex marriages.

 

Also making a last-minute appeal was Matt Foreman, the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, who wore a bright purple tie with his pinstriped suit and made no secret of his goal to eventually see same-sex unions legalized.

 

"We hope to get the bill signed very quickly and extend rights to hundreds of thousands of lesbian, gay and bisexual New Yorkers upstate," Mr. Foreman said at a news conference after the vote, to extended applause from supporters. "And more important, it is the foundation upon which we can finally get moving on the rest of our long-stalled agenda, which includes recognition of our relationships, ending unfair taxation, making our schools safe for young gay and lesbian people, and transgendered people."

 

Mr. Foreman's group, whose strategy of pursuing Republican support for the bill by endorsing Governor Pataki proved successful, had come under attack from some quarters for the failure of the bill to explicitly protect transgendered people.

 

An amendment proposed by Senator Duane that would have included "gender identity and expression" as a category was voted down.

 

At a news conference, Senator David Paterson said that some lawyers believed the bill might already cover the transgendered because it bars discrimination based on gender.

 

The vote, a rare occasion on which Democratic votes mattered in the Republican-led Senate, was an early test for Mr. Paterson. He takes office as minority leader in January, buthe mustered the votes Senator Bruno had said were needed from the minority conference.

 

Only one lawmaker opposed the bill during the debate: Senator Serphin R. Maltese of Queens, who called it "a step in the wrong direction" and said the exemption for religious institutions was not broad enough. Several mainstream religious organizations, like the American Jewish Congress and the New York State Council of Churches, supported the bill.(end of article)

[trilingual]

In a year full of bleak news, this is some holiday cheer indeed! This kind of action by a Republican governor and a long-reluctant Republican state senate might help tilt the Supreme Court a bit as it considers the Texas sodomy law case. Let's hope so!

 

Also, does anyone think that the current on-going Trent Lott saga might have had anything to do with this? Is it possible that the GOP is finally going to start backing away from the bigots and their votes?

[Guest Pulsator]

I don't think the Lott thing has anything to do with this.

This has been building up over the past few years, and the votes were more or less in place to pass the thing in the Senate if only it could be brought to a vote. Bruno agreed to bring it to a vote back in late October when it appeared crucial to get an endorsement for Pataki in the election from the Empire Pride Agenda.

[Guest Bitchboy]

It pleases me a great deal to be able to thank a Republican, something I seriously doubted would ever happen. Pataki, while I didn't vote for him, has proven himself to be less of an enemy to us than some of our "own kind" right here on these forums.

 

:) :)