Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Maryland Anti-Gay-Marriage Law Stopped

Montgomery County State Senator Bill Frosh was able to lead a move to indefinitely table a bill that would have made same-sex marriages illegal. I'll let the Baltimore Sun tell you:
An attempt to revive a constitutional amendment that would prohibit same-sex marriage failed in the Maryland Senate today, apparently leaving no further options this year for opponents of gay marriage.

With a proposal to amend the state constitution languishing in committee and only two weeks left in the General Assembly session, Senate Minority Leader J. Lowell Stoltzfus, R-Somerset, resorted to a rarely used parliamentary move to try to bring the amendment out of the Judicial Proceedings Committee. He submitted a petition asking the Senate to bypass the committee and put the amendment on the agenda for debate.

But Sen. Brian Frosh, D-Montgomery, chairman of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, immediately responded with another unusual move, making a motion to table the Stoltzfus petition indefinitely.

The Frosh motion was approved on a 26-21 vote, and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, D-Calvert, ruled that the amendment cannot be brought up again this session. Seven Democrats joined all 14 Republicans in an unsuccessful attempt to revive the amendment.

The House of Delegates had voted 78-61 earlier in the session to defeat a motion to override the House Judiciary Committee, which killed the same-sex marriage ban in February.

Gay marriage became an issue this year after Baltimore Circuit Judge M. Brooke Murdock ruled that the state law defining marriage as between one man and one woman was unconstitutional. That set off an immediate campaign to amend the constitution to override Murdock's decision.

But the state has appealed the ruling, and Democratic leaders predicted Murdock will be overruled by the Court of Appeals. They argued against amending the constitution while the case is on appeal.

There was only brief discussion in the Senate today before senators disposed of the issue. Attempt to revive gay marriage ban fails in Senate

So this is all interesting, isn't it? Even though some Republicans want you to believe that the people of Maryland are opposed to gay marriage, I think when you get down to it the people here, and especially the people of Montgomery County, are pretty fair-minded. What kind of marriage law we end up with seems to be anybody's guess, but it doesn't sound like our state Senate wants to go down this particular path.

2 Comments:

Blogger Christine said...

That's right. Our State Senate does not want to go down that path. Many people feel it is a violation of human dignity for the state to tell us we can't marry the person we love.

This year Maryland will not be one of the states to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. America already tried denying the basic civil right of marriage to interracial couples during segregation. Love won out in the end, and it will again this time too.

In the past 39 years since Loving v. Virginia was decided, interracial marriage has not destroyed the institution of marriage as it was once feared to do. Allowing interracial couples to wed strenghtened marriage and brought the benefits of marriage to children raised in those homes. The children of same-sex parents deserve no less.

Christine

March 29, 2006 8:23 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hey guys

I haven't been keeping with the site the last week or so but thought I'd drop in to let you know that TTF is mentioned in a story on D1 of today's Wall Street Journal about parental lobbying for comprehensive sex-ed.

March 30, 2006 10:13 AM  

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