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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And they said the NYS Dems' record for shortest tenure as Senate majority party (under 11 months, 1965) was one that would never be broken

Billionaire, thrice-failed gubernatorial candidate, and recent self-proclaimed tax emigrant to Florida Tom "The Golem" Golisano, seen here in an unflattering, apparently stone likeness, is just one of the hilarious players in the summer-stock production of Putsch! currently being played in that hotbed of hilarity, the New York State Senate.

"Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight."

-- from the famous opening number of the classic Larry Gelbart-Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (the first show for which Sondheim provided music as well as lyrics)

by Ken

With our NYS Legislature, by contrast, it's comedy 24/7!

So, who could have foreseen, right? I mean, the way a "coalition" of New York State Senate Republicans and a couple of nominal Democrats -- people you would by and large do your darnedest to avoid allowing in your home -- wrested control of the Senate from the iron grip of Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, thus ending his and the Democrats' five-month tenure as Senate majority party. Or maybe they didn't. (The Dems say the Senate was adjourned before the vote that either did or didn't take place, depending on your viewpoint, and in the best of comedy stylings, the joint is now locked tight, with the keys in the Dems' possession of either the Senate secretary or the sergeant-at-arms, like as if it was the Our Gang clubhouse, while presumably all the players are running frantically to, and trying to break down the doors of, the judges of their choice.

Quite a shocker, eh? Well, maybe not so much.

Yesterday's putsch in Albany may have been "unexpected" in the sense that nobody except the conspirators led by briefly former and apparently soon-to-be once-again Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos knew it was going to happen yesterday. After all, as the breathless local news talking heads were pointing out in their pop-eyed accounts, most everyone expected that that the Senate was going to be accomplishing its current paper-shuffling standard yesterday, which is to say zilch, as the Legislature counts down the last two weeks of the current session.

Oh, it's not that there's nothing to be done. There's a nasty list of things that need to be done by recess (but probably won't be), and then an assortment of lists of things hoped by various parties to be done (expected to suffer a similar fate). But basically where approximately where we were six or seven months ago.

So, in short, pretty much the last thing any of us were expecting was news of any sort from our beloved, gridlocked Senate. But in reality this has been staring us in the face ever since the Dems won "control" (ha!) of the Senate in November, by a tenuous 32-30 margin that's a good deal wispier than it sounds, for the first time since the LBJ presidential landslide year of 1964.

Essentially we're back where we were in December. As you may recall, barely had the election smoke cleared -- with one Senate contest, for the Queens seat being defended by incumbent GOP Sen. Frank Padavan, still undecided -- than it became clear that the Senate Democrats, after all those decades as a permanent minority, didn't face a smooth transition into the majority.

Suddenly there was a Gang of Four or Maybe Three -- Democratic state senators, including one who had only just been elected -- threatening to refuse to vote with their fellow Democrats unless, unless . . . well, it's never been clear what they wanted. It was widely assumed that the key bone of contention, or a key, was opposition to same-sex marriage, and there's no question that this is a big issue to the socially extremely conservative Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx, who is an ardently anti-choice Democrat (and emphatically not to be confused with his progressive son, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.).

But the issue doesn't seem to resonate much with the others. Pedro Espada Jr. doesn't seem to have much history on the issue. He's more known for a history of dubious financial dealings that's outsize even by forgiving Bronx-pol standards. Espada in fact was actually negotiatintg a deal with Malcolm Smith, repudiated when it became public, that among other goodies would, astonishingly, have vaulted him to the position of Senate president pro tempore -- a dream that rechristened GOP Majority Leader in fact delivered on yesterday in a flurry of post-putsch activity. The word generally heard about Espada is that he has ties (financial, one would presume) to landlord interests, which are always in play when it comes time for the Legislature to consider renewal of rent regulation laws. There's no question that a Republican-controlled Senate is a happier playing filed for landlords.

And at least on paper the just-elected Hiram Monserrate of Queens, who quickly backed down from the uprising rumblings, reducing the Gang from Four to Three. is a textbook progressive. But then, Senator Monserrate has other, er, issues, centering around an incident with a girlfriend. He was, as Wikipedia puts it, "arrested on December 19, 2008 and accused of slashing Karla Giraldo in the face with a broken drinking glass during an argument in his Jackson Heights apartment." And in fact it wasn't that long ago that the Republicans were opposing seating their future "coalition" mate Monserrate at all. Complicating matters for the senator, in March a Queens grand jury indicted him on three counts of felony assault and three counts of misdemeanor assault. Word is that his conversion to coalitionism is going to win him some much-needed funding for his defense.

Finally there's my favorite of the bunch: Carl Kruger of Brooklyn, whose sole known governing principle appears to be: What's good for Carl Kruger is good for Carl Kruger. In 2007 Kruger became the first minority-party member in NYS Senate history to be appointed chairman of a committee, and even though Kruger does not appear to have participated in yesterday's coup, it's reported that Skelos has assured our Carl that he will retain his committee chairmanship under the new "coalition" command.

From the evident ethnicity of three of the four, it's not surprising that there was talk of Hispanic resentment at disrespect from the Democratic conference leadership. One wants to be sensitive here, but what possible respect could be shown to people like this? The only discernible thread that joins these Democratic "rebels" is an especially shameless concern for the traditional NYS Leg question "What's in it for me?" But there's a way of doing it that crosses the line into tacky, like when a bribe-giver hands out bare fistfuls of cash rather than taking the trouble to stuff the loot in an envelope that slides easily into the pocket. Now there's class.

Here it's well to remember those decades of permanent-minority status Democratic senators suffered. As I've written before, there was little enough for majority senators to do, since traditionally all their thinking was done for them by their majority leader. But at least they had all those perks of the majority to occupy their attention and help instill a modicum of, um, dignity. In New York's system, there is a raging disproportion between majority and minority loot, which is how the two major parties came to carve up the Legislature after that brief experience of Democratic Senate rule in 1965. The biggest, most intractable disagreement between the parties back then was reapportionment. With each party unwilling the forego the opportunity to pamper itself and screw the opposition, the two houses had still not been able to agree on a judicially acceptable redistricting plan.

With a view to future census-driven redistrictring, the legislative leaders finally hammered out the only compromise they could think of. Knowing that both houses' approval would always be needed for any future reapportionament plan -- that is, assuming that the courts would allow the Legislature to perform the task -- they ceded one house to each party, the often Democratic Assembly to the Dems and the normally Republican Senate to the GOP. I don't know that any formal document was ever drawn, but the brazen understanding was that the parties wouldn't contest each other's sitting members.

It's this agreement that then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer threw over, choosing as part of his battle plan an active challenge to the shrinking Republican Senate majority. Of course the governor wasn't around to take advantage of the result, but then, even before his "difficulties" there was plenty of evidence that his "steamroller" approach wasn't exactly winning friends or influencing people of either party in the Legislature, and I'm not at all sure that he would have succeeded any better than his successor, Govenor Paterson, has managed to do in nurturing the new Senate majority.

Because, especially where there is no history of conference leadership or loyalty, what can you do about people like Espada and Monserrate and Kruger and Diaz? And this is where one wonders where the Senate Democrats, who declared yesterday that they're "going to the mattresses" over the Republican seizure of control of the Senate, really plan to go? Presumably they can keep the Senate shut down for a day, maybe two. But at some point, and I'm guessing some point soon, isn't control of the chamber going to depend on who's got the votes? One hears rumbling of "strategies" being applied to Espada and Monserrate, but really, what can they do? (The more immediate question for Monserrate would appear to be how long an accused felon can string out his tenure. All the way to verdict?)

Meanwhile the Republican-"led" leadership "coalition" is doing a lot of talking about ending the Senate's five-month-long gridlock and even instituting much-need reforms. It sounds crazy, but then, who knows? Maybe the state party, making what appears to be something close to a "last stand," is so bereft of ideas that it's prepared to gamble everything on the most desperate of gambits: good government.

Presumably Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate and maybe even Carl Kruger will vote for that.


THE GOLISANO FACTOR

I see that I've left out of my narrative the role of one of the shadier sideshow attractions in recent New York State history, Tom "The Golem" Golisano. Even back in the early days of the Gang of Four or Maybe Three, it now appears that the anti-leadership machinations were being facilitated if not actually orchestrated by one of the more repellent sideshow attractions in recent state political history. Golisano, a payroll-processing billionaire, has made three failed races for governor, though each time drawing the minimum 50,000 votes to put his so-called Independence Party on state ballots for a while. Like other extremely wealthy folk with too much time on their hands, Tom the Golem seems to have decided that he knows how to make government work.

Apparently Tom's fingerprints are all over yesterday's Senate coup. Which makes one think that he may not have been not entirely serious in his not-long-ago renunciation of the Empire State in favor of Florida (where he already had a residence), a loudly self-declared fugitive from tax policies he announced would cost him, as I recall, an additional $5 million. By creepy coincidence, Gov. David Paterson has loudly opposed even modest tax increases on the rich as a way of closing the state's terrifying budget gap, on the ground that this would cause an outward flight of the rich. Putting the two together, one wonders if the rich person the governor had in mind was Tom the Golem.


COMIC FOOTNOTE: A WORKABLE DEMOCRATIC
SENATE MAJORITY WAS ATTAINABLE IN NOVEMBER

As all of this weren't hilarious enough, to top it all off, as my colleague Debra Cooper has been pointing out since before the election, this didn't have to be. Debra and some lonely-voiced colleagues in the NYS Democratic Party could be heard -- faintly -- screaming that there were several Senate races, including the oh-so-close Padavan seat in Queens, where Democratic pickups were within relatively easy reach. Just the tiniest expenditure of party campaign money and manpower could well have brought those seats home. However, virtually all state party campaign resources were being diverted, by order of the Obama campaign, to the presidential contest in Pennsylvania and other states -- manning phone banks and such.

Yes, the presidential race was important, and NYS Dems were eager and willing to pitch in wherever asked. But it wasn't the only game in town, the only job the state party had to do. For Democrats who believe in the things that New York State Democrats do, there has been a high price to pay for the diversion of all those local campaign resources. Thanks, Team Obama!

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One Step Closer To Marriage Equality In New York? Doubtful

Neutrality or cowardice puts you in bed with the bigots and haters

Last night the New York State Assembly passed a same-sex marriage bill. It's sort of a mixed bag. The good news is that it passed by a wider margin this year than it did last time (2007)-- 89-52 as opposed to 85-61. The bad news is that it doesn't matter much because, although 5 Assembly Republicans went along for the ride, there isn't one single Senate Republican who will-- and a Senate Republican is what's needed in light of the fact that there is a viciously homophobic sociopath, a Democrat, Rev. Ruben Diaz, who is determined to kill it.

Despite intense pressure from New York's Conservative Party-- they're threatening to strip their endorsement from any Republican who votes for equality-- "two Republicans spoke on Tuesday about why they dropped their opposition to granting same-sex couples the right to marry. Three Democrats who voted no in 2007 switched their votes to yes."

“There’s that little voice inside of you that tells you when you’ve done something right, and when you’ve done something wrong,” said Fred W. Thiele Jr., a Republican who represents the Hamptons. “That vote just never felt right to me. That little voice kept gnawing away at me.”

Mr. Thiele’s district overlaps with the Senate district of Kenneth P. LaValle, whom gay rights advocates consider to be among the half-dozen or so Republicans open to a yes vote.

Assemblywoman Janet L. Duprey said a lesbian couple who live on her street helped change her mind.

“They are asking only for equal protection under the law,” said Ms. Duprey, a Republican whose district along the Canadian border in the North Country overlaps with the Senate district of Elizabeth Little, another Republican who gay rights supporters believe is within reach.

“They deserve no less than to have the same rights and ability to share their love,” Ms. Duprey added.

Bob Reilly, a Democratic assemblyman whose district includes parts of Saratoga and Albany Counties, apologized to colleagues for voting no in 2007 before voting yes on Tuesday.

Opponents of the bill condemned same-sex marriage as a moral outrage and an affront to religious institutions in New York. Some, like James N. Tedisco, a Republican whose district includes Schenectady and Saratoga Springs, drew comparisons to polygamy.

“I think you can see the kind of slippery slope we’re going down here,” he said. “What I see here is individuals trying to change the definition of a longstanding institution called marriage to fit into their agenda.”

You can see why Tedisco was defeated in his bid for a congressional seat in a district with 70,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats. He was also stripped of his party leadership position by a GOP wondering if it isn't time to move a little closer to the mainstream.

Monday the NY Times ran an interesting feature on Assemblyman Daniel O'Donnell, the bill's chief sponsor (and the brother of Rosie O'Donnell. It talks a lot about the strategy for passing the bill, but from a very personal angle. I wonder if Obama realizes there's a great deal on animosity starting to build up against him in the gay community-- fueled today by Donald Trump and Carrie Prejean comparing her bigotry and homophobia to his stand-offish/your're-on-your-own position.