It's Back To Court In New Jersey For Gay Marriage
Written by Adrienne Lu Saturday, 09 January 2010 07:49
Gay-rights activists intend to take the fight to allow gay couples to marry in New Jersey directly to the state Supreme Court, advocates said yesterday, one day after the state Senate defeated a bill to allow same-sex marriage.
"We're not even taking a day's rest," said Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay-rights advocacy group Garden State Equality, which has spearheaded the push for same-sex marriage in New Jersey. "Our members have gotten off the mat and are out there continuing the fight seamlessly for marriage equality."
The setback for gay-marriage advocates in New Jersey followed last month's in Albany, where the New York Senate defeated a measure to allow gay couples to wed. Nationally, activists will soon turn their attention to California, where a federal court will hear a challenge to the state's gay-marriage ban.
That case, which could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, was brought not by the nation's most prominent gay rights advocacy groups, but by a group of activists from Hollywood. It is being watched closely because it could determine whether gay couples nationwide have a right to marry.
In New Jersey, Goldstein said Garden State Equality would partner with Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a national gay-rights advocacy organization, to pursue its options.
"Our goal is to file something when it's ready and well-prepared, and we think that will be in a matter of weeks," said Leslie Gabel-Brett, director of education and public affairs for Lambda Legal. She declined to discuss specifics about legal strategy, saying it was premature.
Same-sex marriage opponents said the Senate vote Thursday was yet another indicator that the public in New Jersey, as elsewhere in the country, is not ready for same-sex marriage.
"If rights can be granted through other mechanisms, let's do that, but let's keep marriage as it always has been," said Len Deo, president of the New Jersey Family Policy Council.
But some same-sex marriage advocates argued yesterday that despite the final outcome in the state Senate, the fight to post the bill actually helped their cause by building a record of agreement that the existing civil-unions law is not the answer.
"We have now built a record that both sides, supporters and former opponents of civil unions . . . [have said] that civil unions do not work," said State Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D., Bergen), a sponsor of the bill. "We have a record from the Judiciary Committee meeting as well as what happened [Thursday's floor debate] to build on that."
Ben Dworkin, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, agreed.
"If you have many legislators getting up and saying publicly in a floor debate that the civil-unions law doesn't work, I think there's an opportunity to go before the courts and say the Legislature says it doesn't work," Dworkin said.
In the floor debate Thursday, legislators on both sides of the issue acknowledged that the civil-unions law in New Jersey is imperfect.
Same-sex marriage supporters argued that is because separate can never be equal, while their opponents argued the law simply needs to be better enforced.
The state Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the state must provide same-sex couples with the same rights and privileges as married heterosexual couples, but left it to the Legislature to decide what to call the couples' relationships. The Legislature chose to call them civil unions rather than marriages.
Brigid Harrison, a political scientist at Montclair State University, said returning to the judicial system was clearly not the first choice of gay-rights advocates.
"If the state Supreme Court were the most likely strategy of implementing this, that's the tactic they would have used initially," Harrison said. "So this is a Plan B strategy."
On the bright side, said Jennifer Pizer, marriage project director for Lambda Legal, the Senate vote "gives a clear green light for us to return to court and ask the court to enforce the constitution."
"It was not a proud moment for the New Jersey Legislature, but we will go to court and ask the court to provide the remedy that's overdue," she added.
Read the original article in The Philadelphia Inquirer
Contact staff writer Adrienne Lu at 609-989-8990 or alu@phillynews.com.
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