On June 24, 2011, the New York state legislature passed a bill that legalized gay marriage. This legislation is indeed ground breaking, making New York one of only six states in the country which permit same sex couples to marry. Marriage equality legislation was introduced on a yearly basis and was defeated with regularity, albeit by small margins. This year the Democratically controlled Assembly supported the legislation as it had in the past. It is the Republican controlled Senate whose support was new and significant.
Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg were both staunch supporters of the bill. More importantly, so were the wealthy Wall Street donors who run New York politics and decide who will and won’t serve in office and under what conditions.
According to a report in the New York Times, history was made because these financial heavy hitters donors made it so. They worked hand in hand with Cuomo to assure the Republicans willing to change their votes that they would be protected from opposition and not pay a political price for their actions. Marriage equality now exists in New York because enough rich people wanted it.
These same donors made certain that the state’s millionaire’s tax also made history, by disappearing. The same Democratic governor who forced wage and pension concessions from public employee unions was adamant that rich people would not pay their fair share in a time of growing budget deficits. He refused to even consider raising the income threshold and allowing the tax to exist in some form. The result is that wealthy New Yorkers now pay less in taxes than working people do.
The marriage equality outcome is right both morally and politically, but it is not the only item on the progressive agenda which New York legislators need to address. New York City continues its draconian practice of rounding up blacks and Latinos through marijuana arrests and state legislative action which would make this misdemeanor a violation and therefore not subject to arrests, languishes. Rent regulations which allow apartments to be lost to so-called “vacancy decontrol” have not been addressed, pushing more and more working people out of New York City because they cannot find affordable housing.
