Gov. Markell signs the marriage-equality bill on the staircase of Legislative Hall.
The First State today became the eleventh to legalize same-sex marriage when Governor Jack Markell signed a marriage bill into law just minutes after it passed by a vote of 12-9 in the state senate. "I do not intend to make any of you wait one moment longer," he told a group of supporters. The bill was passed by the state house, 23-18, a couple of weeks ago.
Democratic state senator Karen Peterson came out publicly during today's senate debate and acknowledged her 24-year partnership, saying:
Neither of us chose to be gay, any more than heterosexual people chose to be straight. Nobody gets to make those decisions anymore than we decide to be tall, short, black or white. We are what God made us. We don’t need to be fixed. We’re not broken. . . . if my happiness somehow demeans or diminishes your marriage, then you need to work on your marriage.
Marriages will commence on July 1, and existing civil unions in Delaware will automatically be converted to marriages then.
Socialist deputies applaud in the National Assembly today following passage of the same-sex marriage bill.
Antigay demonstrator hurls a missile at police during a protest following the vote in Parliament.
The French National Assembly approved the final passage of a same-sex marriage bill today by a vote of 331-225, along party lines, making France the 14th nation in the world to approve marriage equality nationwide. President Francois Hollande's Socialist Party swept into power last year with a promise to enact the law, which recent polls have shown is favored by by 55%-63% of the population.
However, rightwing activists, with the support of France's Catholic hierarchy and American antigay groups like NOM, have made an issue of the adoption rights which marriage would allow to gay couples, equating it to "the murder of children," along with the familiar rhetoric about "traditional family values." In recent months, they have led massive, sometimes violent demonstrations against the law in the streets of Paris. After tonight's vote, protesters decrying "Socialist dictatorship" once again clashed with police. Gay haters are also circulating messages of "Death to Gays" and "Homosexuals Must Be Killed" on Twitter. The conservative UMP party, which has used the marriage law to regain some support among voters, now plans to appeal the law to France's Constitutional Court, which has the power to disallow the law before it comes into effect (unlike the American Supreme Court), but analysts say there is little likelihood of that occurring, and same-sex couples may be able to marry starting in June. Since 1999, France has offered civil unions, called PACS, to both gay and straight couples; straights made up more than 95% of couples getting "PACS-ed" in 2010. However, the PACS provides significantly fewer rights than marriage, and does not allow gay couples to adopt.
In other marriage news, same-sex marriage bills advanced in the Delaware House and the Rhode Island Senate, and the Nevada Senate approved the first step in removing that state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Also, Nevada state senator Kelvin Atkinson (D-North Las Vegas), came out publicly, saying:
I know this is the first time many of you have heard me say that I am a black, gay male. . . . If this hurts your marriage, then your marriage was in trouble in the first place.
A 2010 map of relationship recognition laws in the fifty states: For an updated map, visit HRC's map page.
This year of grace 2012 began with a handful of couples in two states, Delaware and Hawaii, entering civil unions just after the stroke of midnight last night. So progress comes in with the New Year, little by little and step by step. It seems agonizingly slow to us old codgers - who were all of us at one time unconvicted felons, you might say, in the decades before the sodomy laws were struck down in 2003 - but I suppose every little advance is worth the wait.
A hundred years from now, if the world holds together that long, no doubt future generations of gays and lesbians will take marriage equality as a given, and wonder what all the fuss was about. Well, that's what we are looking forward to, even if us old geezers don't live to see it. All good wishes to the happy couples joined today and hereafter.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
