Hooray for Massachusetts.
A proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was defeated today by a joint session of the Legislature by a vote of 151 to 45, eliminating any chance of getting it on the ballot in November 2008. The measure needed at least 50 votes to advance.
The vote came after House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, Senate President Therese Murray, and Governor Deval Patrick conferred this morning and concluded that they have the votes to kill the proposal.
"In Massachusetts today, the freedom to marry is secure," Patrick told reporters after the vote.
The three leaders - along with gay rights activists - spent the last several days intensely lobbying a dozen or more state representatives and state senators who had previously supported the amendment but signaled that they were open to changing their positions.
Because fewer than 50 of the state's 200 lawmakers supported the amendment, it will not appear on the 2008 ballot, giving gay marriage advocates a major victory in their battle with social conservatives to keep same-sex marriage legal in Massachusetts.
Opponents of gay marriage face an increasingly tough battle to win legislative approval of any future petitions to appear on a statewide ballot. The next election available to them is 2012.
While it was the courts who first granted Massachusetts residents the same marriage rights regardless of sexual orientation, this is now a legislative ratification of that decision. And given the low bar necessary to place this on the ballot (50 votes out of 200), the decision was a decisive one.
Little by little, this country will realize that granting special rights to straight couples violates every tenet upon which this nation was founded.
Update: Look at the pernicious effect gay marriage is having on marriage in Massachusetts! (From MikeBaseball in the comments)
PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference to "Massachusetts liberals" as if they were referring to people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time to do some research on these people, and here is what I found.
The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.
But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates [...]
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
It's the difference between people who embrace love, and those who seek to politicize and demonize it.
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