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The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Sáb, 14 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
When Is a Flip Not a Flop?
At the end of January, New York’s Conservative Party,
the most influential of the minor parties that complicate
the state’s politics, celebrated its 50th anniversary at a
Holiday Inn near the Albany airport, a vast and dingy
venue that reminded me of athlete housing left over
from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Politicians like
former Gov. George Pataki, who owed his election to
the Conservatives, came to pay homage to the party
for its record of steering the state’s politics to the
right.But one calamity darkened the mood of nostalgia
and self­-congratulation: the passage last summer of a
law legalizing same­-sex marriage. For many New
Yorkers, the June 24 marriage vote was a rare
moment of goosebump drama from a capital better
known for tedious dysfunction. For the Conservatives,
and in particular for Mike Long, the ex­-marine who has
been the party’s chairman for nearly half of its history,
the vote was a triple humiliation.
It was, first, a defining triumph for the state’s ambitious
new Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo. Second, it
was an abandonment by Republican leaders, who had
invoked party discipline to kill similar legislation in
2009. This time the Republican leaders publicly
opposed gay marriage, but knowing that both public
opinion and lobbying muscle were coalescing on the
other side, they freed their members to vote as they
wished. And that led to what was, for Mike Long, an
unforgivable betrayal. All four of the Republican
senators who voted for the bill and provided the
necessary margin for it to pass had been elected with
the Conservative endorsement, a prize for which
opposition to gay marriage was an essential litmus
test. Two of those wayward senators would not have
won their seats without the Conservative boost.
Try as they might to explain away the defections —
perhaps it was the lure of money from gay hedge­-fund
billionaires, or some devilish deal with Cuomo — the
Conservatives feared that this defeat, if not punished,
could mean an ominous loss of influence.
The four Republican apostates now had targets on
their backs.
It is difficult to construct an argument against marriage
rights for gay people that doesn’t sound like an
argument against gay people. Mike Long and his
fellow partisans, like many conservatives nationwide,
build their case on what they call “the defense of
traditional marriage.” No society in history, they told me
repeatedly, has extended marriage rights to
homosexuals, and so we shouldn’t risk the unraveling
of civilization by starting now. (Apparently they don’t
count the 10 countries, from Canada to South Africa,
where gays may legally marry and civilization
endures.) I’ve had a few conversations with Long,
trying to understand what harm they think they are
defending marriage from. In one conversation I
recounted my own classic wedding at the Holy Name
of Jesus church, and wondered how somebody else’s
less conventional marriage could diminish the joy of it.
“Well, I don’t think it hurts anybody,” Long replied, “but
I think a society has to have certain standards, and
since the beginning of time, marriage has been
between a man and a woman.” Marriage, he
elaborated, is about children. “You’re not going to
procreate children with same­-sex couples.”
I told him that would be news to my daughters’ school
classmates, the ones with two moms or two dads. And
by the way, we don’t prohibit elderly, infertile or just
plain procreation­-averse couples from marrying.
“I know plenty of gay couples, O.K.?” he snapped
back. “Some of them, if not all of them, are very good
people, O.K.? I just don’t believe that society needs to
change what the definition of marriage is to
accommodate their lifestyle. That’s all. You know, that
may be old­-school. But I think Western civilization has
done pretty good old­-school.”
The quartet of dissident Republicans are themselves
fairly old­-school, at least when it comes to the rest of
their conservative credentials. They come not from
liberal Manhattan or the upscale suburbs of
Westchester County. They are upstate guys, from
struggling former mill towns and diminished Rust Belt
cities. So while the senators’ political calculus differs
from district to district, their experiences give us a
glimpse into how this issue is likely to play out in “real
America,” as conservatives are fond of calling it, and
not just in the coastal metropolises. Which is why the
fates of these four are being watched intently by
national lobbies and wavering politicians across the
country.
Bill Keller is a former executive editor of The Times. He
writes a column for the Op­-Ed page.
EDITOR: Greg Veis
The least vulnerable of the four is probably Stephen M.
Saland, a patrician­-looking lawyer whose
Poughkeepsie district sits about a two­-hour drive north
of New York City. A Capitol fixture since 1980 and a
conscientious legislative technician, Saland negotiated
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