A Service of Rainbow Law

Next Up for Gay Marriage, Pennsylvania?

Written by Steven Reynolds Friday, 05 June 2009 05:18

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Could it be that Pennsylvania will follow the Northeast and Iowa and legalize gay marriage?

Well, PA still has that Alabama problem, but there are stirrings in support of same sex liberty and marriage equality here.

Yesterday New Hampshire became the sixth state in the union to extend civil marriage to gay and lesbian couples yesterday. The legislature passed the provions, the Governor signed it into law, and the Republicans whined. New Hampshire joins Maine and Massachusetts and Vermont and Connecticut and Iowa in leading the nation to liberty, and there is talk of New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island making a clean sweep of it in the Northeast. There’s good news everywhere on the movement to give gay and lesbian citizens full civil rights. Heck, Harvard University just established an endowed Chair in gay studies, named after famed literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen. (This appears to be not the mere accepting a gift to fund the Chair, but the sign of an institutional commitment on the part of Harvard.) All is good, eh?

But what about Pennsylvania, the land with Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabama in between, to paraphrase James Carville? What about the state where God, guns and bitterness sometimes seem far more important than liberty? Well, sometimes Pennsylvanians get it right. State Senator Daylin Leach, who who has certainly faced slimey Republican tactics in his political past, including being accused of being an anti-semite, has introduced a bill in PA legalizing gay marriage. Today in the Philadelphia Daily News Leach writes about his bill:

There is no reasonable alternative to same-sex marriage. Same-sex couples will always exist. Many are raising children. Many opponents of gay marriage preach that children shouldn’t be raised out of wedlock, but the one sure way to raise the number of children being raised out of wedlock is to deny their parents the chance to marry. They also urge young people to delay sex until marriage. But if gay people can’t marry, what would they tell a gay teen about when it is appropriate for him to have a sexual relationship?

Gay couples are denied many of the basic rights and services straight couples take for granted. This includes everything from Social Security survivor benefits to mandatory leave to care for a sick partner.

FURTHER, they and their children are forced to live under a legal framework that treats their families as somehow not legitimate.

There are literally thousands of such unjust burdens placed upon people who want nothing more than to start a family. Simple decency demands an end to this.

I’m under no illusions that this bill will become law in the short term. But I also have no doubt that 15 years from now, same-sex marriage will be legal in all 50 states, and people will be as ashamed that we ever banned it as they are now that we ever banned interracial marriage. My hope is that by introducing this bill now, we’ll start the discussion to bring the day of equality closer.

I am frankly as optimistic as Senator Leach. The rights of marriage for gay and lesbian couples is the right thing to do, and Americans have a long and proud history of doing the right thing, though sometimes after many fits and starts. Pennsylvania has a lawmaker who is throwing some bigtime fits, of course. Hia name is John Eichelberger, and he’s from the middle of the state, the Alabama part Carville spoke of. Not satisfied with a DOMA law in PA, Eichelberger wants to amend the state constitution to limit rights for others, and he announced the amendment on May 19th of this year. No word yet on exactly what his amendment will look like and how many cosponsors he will have, and when asked Eichelberger says, “I’m not telling.”

Let’s make sure to note that the days when actions such as Eichelberger’s worked are long gone, even in Pennsylvania. As the Philadelphia Inquirer notes, the last three times a right wing marriage amendment was introduced in PA it failed, even with a Republican-led Senate. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Bills containing a constitutional amendment on marriage have been introduced in each of the last three legislative sessions, and none has been voted out of the Republican-led Senate.

Gay-rights advocates, on the other hand, have struggled to win support for seemingly less-controversial legislation that would forbid discrimination against gay people in housing and employment.

G. Terry Madonna, a political analyst and professor at Franklin and Marshall College, said the debut of the same-sex-marriage bill was “recognition of the times,” while the repeated failure of the marriage amendment to win approval in the Senate suggested a “contentment with the status quo.”

“They don’t want to roil debate,” Madonna said.

As noted earlier, it is likely too soon to hope for the legalization of gay marriage in Pennsylvania, but that does not make it any less inevitable. The Republicans have been losing ground in this state precisely because they are not responsive to change in the electorate, which is becoming less and less Alabama all the time. Daylin Leach may well be ahead of his time, but that is only good.

Read the original article in All Spin Zone