New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a moderate Republican,
announced that while he supports the right of gay couples to marry,
the city will appeal last week's ruling by a state judge giving the
Big Apple 30 days to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex
couples. Despite his support for gay marriage, Bloomberg said the
state court's ruling was not the way to achieve that goal. As
reported in the New
York Sun (the place to go for honest analysis):
The judge's decision caught Mr. Bloomberg and his aides off-guard and put him in a position of having to choose between courting the city's liberal majority and fending off challengers from his right in a campaign year....
Mr. Bloomberg told two hostile crowds - the Human Rights Campaign and the Lesbian & Gay Pride Foundation - that he was appealing the decision because the ruling "was incorrect" and "the current state Constitution does not permit same-sex marriages." He was heckled and booed by the two audiences, and his critics wasted no time in criticizing his attempt to have it both ways.
Yet, interestingly:
Gay activists in the city said privately they sympathized with the mayor. While they want support for gay marriages, there is a widespread belief in the community that the dust-up caused by the San Francisco marriages didn't help their cause, it hurt. Having New York rush to allow marriages that might only be rolled back later doesn't make much sense, they said.
And that's a response that does make sense.
This matter is going to go to the state's highest court one way or
another, given the upstate marriage suits that Democratic Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer is fighting. If the court upholds gay
marriage, couples in NYC can then get married. If it goes the other
way, what would be gained by allowing mass weddings of dubious
legality on the City Hall steps, repeating the images that came out
of San Francisco last year that gays cheered but many others viewed
as an anarchistic assault on marriage, thus fueling the national
backlash. And to what end, since California's high court than
nullified those weddings?