6 - New York
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2009
Summary
In may 2003, Jason West was elected mayor of the Village of New Paltz, about seventy miles north of New York City. In two prior attempts at public office, campaigns for the state assembly in 2000 and 2002, West lost by large margins. But getting out the vote of students from the State University of New York College at New Paltz, the twenty-six-year-old Green Party candidate achieved his first electoral success in the mayoral race.
Soon after taking office, West asked Spencer McLaughlin, the village attorney, to investigate whether New York State mayors had the capacity to preside over same-sex marriages. McLaughlin wrote a memorandum indicating that state law was ambiguous and that the mayor's judgment would determine the matter in the final analysis. Mayor West continued the story:
I had Spencer's memo and, reading the law myself, thought it crystal-clear that [same-sex marriage] was already legal [in New York].
I started talking to [lesbian and gay] couples in the summer of 2003 and found a handful of people who might be interested in marriage, were it legal. None of them had really committed to it yet, because it had never been a possibility for them before. It's a hard enough decision for straight couples to get married, for whom it's always an option. So these couples who had never had the choice took a while to think about it.
In January, my friends Billiam and Jeffrey said, “Yes, let's do it. We want to be the first couple you marry.[…]
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- America's Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage , pp. 143 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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