So You’ve Passed Gay Marriage In New York — Now What?

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Gay rights supporters in New York are riding high after the success of the marriage equality law, and are optimistically talking up efforts to advance gay rights in other states. But it might not be so easy.

After New York became the sixth and largest state to pass marriage equality, gay rights advocates took to the streets to celebrate. And local gay rights heroes have been talking up the state’s potential to influence the national conversation.

“If New York can do it, it’s okay for every other place to do it. If New York did it, every other place is now going to be posed with the question,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said Sunday.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) had a similar take on the law’s implications at the federal level: “I think having a state like New York–such a large state–come out in favor of marriage equality in a bipartisan way, with several Republican Senators taking the lead, will help strengthen our cause in the Senate, because I believe that we can create a bipartisan effort to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and make sure that the federal government protects all families and protects all marriages,” she told the New York Observer. “And I think that this will help us in moving that legislation forward this year.

[TPM SLIDESHOW: ‘Thank You Governor Cuomo’: Gay Pride Parade Celebrates Marriage Equality]

Kevin Nix, Director of Communications for the Human Rights Campaign, told TPM that New York “is sort of the media, cultural, financial capitol of the world and can really set the standard for the rest of the country.”

“I think New York is a game changer in terms of marriage equality because state lawmakers in other states and in D.C., frankly, will look to New York to see what happens,” he said.

But as Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times writes: “The movement’s success here could prove difficult to replicate. Twenty-nine states have constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, while 12 others have laws against it. And many of those states where support for same-sex marriage is high have already acted on the issue.”

New York is one of those states: A new Q Poll shows that 54% of New Yorkers support the recently-signed marriage equality law. Among them, 70% of voters under the age of 35 said they support it, as opposed to 57% over the age of 65 who oppose it.

But in a state like Minnesota, where the poll numbers are tighter, things might be different. Minnesota is being closely watched over a potential 2012 ballot measure that would stipulate that marriage can only be between a man and a woman — similar to California’s Proposition 8, which is working its way through the court system after being ruled unconstitutional. 46% of Minnesotans surveyed said in a recent PPP Poll that they support the measure, while 47% oppose it.

A closer fight on the horizon is in Maryland, where gay rights supporters are looking to revive a recently-shelved marriage equality bill. State Sen. Richard S. Madaleno, Jr. (D), who sponsored the bill, said it was shelved because the state hadn’t played the kind of ground game that New York did.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Madaleno, in a telephone interview on Saturday, said Maryland gay-rights advocates had failed to mount the kind of vigorous, multimillion-dollar grass-roots campaign that their allies in New York ran this spring. Nor had they pressed the state’s Democratic governor, Martin O’Malley, to deploy his own political capital and muscle on their behalf, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did in New York.

“We had not done as good a job beating the bushes in districts as they did in New York,” Madaleno said. “Our hope is that not only will our legislature take a cue from our colleagues in Albany, but that our governor might as well.”

One source of optimism for gay rights groups is that New York’s law came into being because of bipartisan support. Nix, of the HRC, said that marriage equality “prevailed because of those Republicans coming over to support us.”

“I think that one of the main messages out of New York is that marriage equality is now truly a bipartisan issue and it is also a mainstream issue,” he said.

Indeed, as the Times reported, Cuomo met with wealthy Republican donors in the weeks leading up to the vote, and successfully got them to go and convince the holdout Senate Republicans to support the bill.

But there are other forces afoot, even in New York.

Mike Long, chairman of New York’s powerful Conservative Party, has said he won’t support any Republican in 2012 who backs same-sex marriage. And the National Organization for Marriage has now pledged $2 million — double its previous pledge before the vote — in the 2012 elections “to make sure Republicans understand that voting for gay marriage has consequences.”

Nix dismissed this, however, pointing out that NOM “underperformed” in New York in its opposition, and “committed $1 million a month ago in New York to defeat elected officials who supported marriage equality.” But then it passed anyway, “so then they come back the same night and said, ‘oh now we’re gonna commit $2 million.'”

“So it doesn’t seem like that that pledge did very much,” he said.

But Brian Brown, president of NOM, sees it differently. “The fact is,” he told the Times, “we’ve won every single vote of the people on the marriage issue.”

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