Gay Marriage Backers
Hope to Sway N.J. Lawmakers
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Danielle Austen for The New York Times
Gay rights supporters gathered outside the New Jersey
Supreme Court in Trenton Wednesday before the decision by seven
justices on same-sex marriage was announced. |
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI,
NYTimes on the Web, October 26, 2006
TRENTON, Oct. 25 — The New
Jersey Supreme Court may have conferred the rights of married couples to
same-sex partners in a long-awaited decision on Wednesday, but it also made it
clear that the fight for gay marriage did not end with its decision.
The next appeal for gay rights advocates, the court emphasized, “must be to
their fellow citizens whose voices are heard through their popularly elected
representatives.”
The issue revolves around a single word — whether to call this newly constructed
relationship, which has all the rights and obligations of marriage — a marriage.
But it will be far from simple when the issue lands a few blocks away at the
State House, where the governor and the Legislature have 180 days, according to
the court, to come up with an answer.
Gay rights advocates say they will press hard to call this new legal
relationship a marriage and not something else, such as a civil union.
Many conservatives, meanwhile, have promised to push for a constitutional
amendment to ban gay marriage — just as some lawmakers are doing now in
Massachusetts, where that state’s Supreme Judicial Court validated a right to
gay marriage in 2003.
And one Republican lawmaker in New Jersey has promised to seek the impeachment
of all seven justices — an unlikely quest in the Democratic-controlled
Legislature.
Gov. Jon S. Corzine and top legislative leaders — all Democrats — are on record
as opposing gay marriage and saying they view marriage as a union between a man
and a woman.
Two years ago, New Jersey Democrats managed to sidestep the gay marriage issue
when they passed a domestic partnership law that offered same-sex couples some —
but not all — of the rights that married couples have.
Now the issue is back, and there appears to be no getting around it. And
for lawmakers, it comes as all 120 members of the Legislature face re-election
in 2007.
Governor Corzine said he welcomed the court’s conclusions, adding, “I look
forward to the legislative process implementing the court’s decision.”
But in a joint statement, Richard J. Codey, the Senate president, and Joseph J.
Roberts Jr., the Assembly speaker, indicated that Democrats would not go the
extra step of defining the new legal partnership as a marriage.
Another top Democrat, Senator Raymond J. Lesniak of Union County, echoed that
point. He said that he and other members of the party’s caucus had
discussed a compromise, which would extend the marriage rights to gay couples
but classify their relationships as “civil unions.”
“Marriage has been a religious institution adopted by the government and a lot
of religions have defined it in a way that that excludes gays,” Mr. Lesniak
said. “That’s not what the government does, and the court clearly demands
that we offer gay couples the same rights and obligations that heterosexual
couples have under our marriage laws. But we can do it in a way that
respects people’s religious beliefs.”
A similar approach was used by Vermont legislators after that state’s high court
struck down gay marriage law according to William N. Eskridge Jr., a Yale Law
School professor who has written extensively on the issue.
But partisans of both sides of the gay marriage divide say they would not be
satisfied with that approach. Garden State Equality, which has lobbied for
gay marriage rights, began airing a television commercial asking for “marriage
equality.”
Republicans, meanwhile, indicated that they will be wary about attempts to alter
New Jersey’s current domestic partnership law. State Senator Leonard
Lance, the minority leader, said he thought the court was overstepping its
bounds by ordering legislators to rewrite the law.
Although the battlefront has shifted to the State Legislature, the ruling
nonetheless had some spillover into New Jersey’s tight race for the United
States Senate.
Both Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, and State Senator Thomas H. Kean Jr.,
his Republican challenger, oppose gay marriage, so it has not been an issue in
their campaigns. But Mr. Kean responded to Wednesday’s court decision by
saying that he would favor a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Mr. Menendez said that he supported civil unions and would oppose any
constitutional amendment that would take away people’s legal rights.
But the immediate response to the court’s decision, he said, “is now up to the
Legislature to decide.”
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