The NYS Senate's day of decision on same-sex marriage: It's a punt!

As reported on Pam's House Blend, die-hard homophobic NYS Sen. Ruben Díaz Sr. received an unexpected grilling -- actual follow-up questions! -- from NY1 Noticias anchor Juan Manuel Benitez

by Ken

As some of you may recall, I'm heading out this evening to the Municipal Art Society's "Crossing Newtown Creek" walking tour, and I was afraid I was going to have to leave an "events pending" report on the down-to-the-wire showdown in the Republican-controlled State Senate on a bill finally submitted by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo which would legalize same-sex marriage in New York State. Governor Cuomo has been saying all along that he would not press a bill that wasn't assure of passage, and there should face no serious obstacles in the Democratic-controlled State Assembly.

As of this morning, with two Senate Republicans having announced that they would vote yes and all but one Democrat, the intractable Ruben Díaz Sr. (about whom more in a moment, and by the way not to be confused with his eminently reasonable son, Bronx Borough President Ruben Díaz Jr.), supposedly on board, supporters were one vote shy of the 32 needed for passage, with a clump of still-undecideds still officially undecided. With the session drawing to a close, and consideration-time requirements making it more and more difficult to introduce new legislation in the Senate, it seemed as if crunch time was upon us. The additional legislative wrinkle is that the actual head count may not even matter, since Senate Republicans don't have to let the thing come to a floor vote if they don't want to.

THE NYS CONSERVATIVE PARTY CUDGEL

One thing to remember is that Senate Republicans are under notice from Michael Long, chairman of the NYS Conservative Party, whose cross-endorsement is all but essential to any state Republican's electoral hopes, that any Republican who breaks ranks on same-sex marriage will not only not be supported but will be actively opposed by his party.

Well, the suspense ended earlier than expected, at least for today. As Gay City News's Simon Garron-Caine and Paul Schindler reported this afternoon:

BREAKING: NYS Senate Punts on Marriage Equality for Today

Majority Leader Dean Skelos says discussions will continue Thursday

Published: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 2:51 PM EDT
BY SIMON GARRON-CAINE AND PAUL SCHINDLER

The New York State Senate Republican majority conference emerged from a closed-door meeting today having failed to reach agreement on whether to allow a floor debate and vote on Governor Andrew Cuomo's marriage equality bill.

"We have reached no conclusion," Dean Skelos, the Long Island Republican who is the majority leader, told reporters as he came out of the meeting. "Members have asked me to keep these discussions in confidence, and we will conference again on it tomorrow."

Greg Ball, the Putnam County Republican who has for weeks raised concerns about the need for religious exemptions, continued talking about that issue as he left the room.

Earlier in the day, Ball released a letter spelling out requirements for language he would need to see in the bill in order to support it. One of those requirements is that religious organizations be exempt from providing services to which they object on religious grounds -- a demand that would seem to go well beyond the carve-outs already existing in New York law that Cuomo incorporated into his marriage equality program bill. . . .

This "religious exemption" business is a now-familiar combination alibi-scam used by right-wingers who really want to say, "God, I hate me them effing gays and wish to hell I could eff 'em all" (or perhaps vice versa), but are forced by effing political correctness to couch their objection more, er, discreetly. Hence the lying bullshit about protecting religious institutions against dastardly fag-friendly oppression. As Garron-Caine and Schindler suggest, Senator Ball seems to be raising the stakes for the scam. Knowing full well that his objections are already answered in the bill as written, he's going to see if he can ram through some loopholes that will effectively allow religious organizations to eff any effing effer they effing well please -- and eff you, effwad!

Earlier I mentioned Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., who earned notoriety as one of the "gang of three" (or sometimes four, or two) NYS senators who succeded in crippling the then-Democratic majority in the last legislative session, helping lay the groundwork for the Republican recapture of the Senate. Back on June 1 Pam Spaulding, of the great Pam's House Blend blog, ran an extraordinary guest post by Spanish-language journalist Tony Varona, who reported on the unexpected grilling the senator received from anchor Juan Manuel Benitez on NY1 Noticias, the Spanish-language sister channel of Time Warner Cable's New York news channel.

Varona explained:

As a Cuban-born native Spanish-speaker, I consume media in both English and Spanish. Time and again I have seen how bilingual and bicultural politicians, religious leaders and other public figures make outrageously defamatory and inaccurate statements against the LGBT community in Spanish media that they would never get away with making in English-language broadcast and print interviews. Much of the time, the interviewer allows them to make whatever outlandish and homophobic or transphobic claims about us without any follow-up questions or challenge of any sort. Not so with Juan Manuel Benitez's 21-minute interview of Sen. Díaz.

Benitez repeatedly challenged Díaz's antigay statements, demanded facts to back up his extreme claims, and ended up performing one of the most thorough, cringe-worthy journalistic grilling of a gay rights opponent I have ever seen, in any language.

In a remarkable exchange (translated here by Varona), Benitez tries to find out whether the senator, a pentacostal minister who claims to be afraid that gays will come into his church and force him to marry them, understands that the bill refers only to civil marriage, and "no one will go to your church to have you marry them." Benitez is never able to find out whether the senator actually knows what's in the bill to which he objects so vehemently. Eventually the dialogue comes down to this:

Benitez: I don't know if you have read the bill, but the bill specifically excludes churches and deals only with civil marriage, which is performed by civil authorities. It deals with civil marriage and not religious marriage.

Sen. Díaz: One of the other senators just said that he would prefer if they would include -- so that specifically it would be clear -- that it would not force ministers and churches . . .

Benitez: And if the bill included that more specific language -- that the churches would be excluded and there would be no problem with discrimination by churches - would that mean that you would vote in favor of civil marriage equality?

Sen. Díaz: For me, no, I would vote no because [ . . ..] it is against nature . . . and it just should not exist.

There's quite a lot more to the interview (you really owe it to yourself to read the full post), in which the senator tries to deny that he's a homophobe. Well, judge for yourself.

Well, tomorrow is another day. I guess we'll just have to wait to see what it brings.

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