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with Cuomo the details of a shrewd compromise that
assured religious organizations that they would not be
compelled to participate in gay marriages, giving a bit
of shelter to lawmakers worried about religious
blowback. Saland agonized over this issue with his
gay­-marriage­-supporting wife, but one acquaintance
said his decision seemed to grow out of his immersion
in the legislative language. He refused to talk for this
article because of an old grudge against The Times
over what an aide described as “an out­-of­-context
quote.”Roy J. McDonald, who represents former mill
towns like Troy and Mechanicville, didn’t see much
percentage in reminiscing about his vote, either. He
literally backpedaled as I interviewed him in the Senate
lobby. “I did what I thought was right,” he told me. The
voters “understand that,” but now they want to talk
about jobs and foreclosures, not marriage. “I can’t
dwell on this stuff.” McDonald is a Vietnam veteran
and former steelworker. Though he is now a banker,
he retains a bluff manner, but with a compassionate
streak when it comes to those born different. Friends
say he has two autistic grandsons, and watching the
insensitivity the boys endured gave him a kind of
collateral distaste for those who would marginalize
gays. McDonald, entirely in character, responded to
criticism by announcing that if doing the right thing
costs him his seat, “They can take the job and shove
it.” That did not sit well with some local Republican
leaders, but it’s the kind of directness his constituents
seem to like.
Jim Alesi, who formerly had a business operating
laundry rooms in apartment buildings and dormitories,
has been in politics for 23 years. He represents a
swath of the Rochester area that’s more white­-collar
than blue­-. When the Senate rejected gay marriage in
2009, Alesi toed his party’s line, but he held his head
in visible distress, in part because it felt like a betrayal
of his friend Thomas Duane, the Senate’s only openly
gay member. “I promised myself then that I would
never vote no on this issue again,” he told me. And
because his relatively affluent electorate leans
moderate on social issues, the vote was not likely to
fire up a huge reaction. Unfortunately for Alesi, he has
other liabilities — more on those later — and he knows
that some in his own party, not just the Conservatives,
would like to throw him overboard.
Mark Grisanti should be the most endangered
Republican in the Senate. He is a freshman, an Italian
Catholic Republican in a slice of the Buffalo region that
is five­-to­-one Democratic and nearly 40 percent black.
He won his seat by a mere 519 votes over an
incumbent African­-American Democrat, Antoine
Thompson. Thompson supported gay marriage, not a
popular view in the black churches of Buffalo.
The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Sáb, 14 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
Grisanti didn’t make a big deal of marriage in his
campaign, but he told people he was in the
man­-and­-a­-woman camp, which probably bought him
a smattering of black support. Moreover, Grisanti was
listed on the ballot as the candidate of the
Conservative Party in addition to being the Republican
nominee, and he reaped 4,368 votes on the
Conservative line.
So it is not a stretch to suggest that, between
Conservative and black votes, Mark Grisanti owes his
seat to the fact that he identified himself as a “no” vote
on gay marriage. It is also not a stretch, as you will
see, to say that if he wins re­-election, it will be because
he changed his mind.
The choice of a gay rights tour guide in Buffalo was
obvious. Kitty Lambert and her partner were the state’s
first gay newlyweds. When the law went into effect,
she and Cheryle Rudd — both longtime gay rights
activists and, as Lambert likes to say, “two fat
grandmothers” — drove from their home in Buffalo up
to Niagara Falls for a midnight ceremony. Lambert
grew up Mormon, endured a series of husbands in the
effort to live up to her religion’s expectations and came
out as a lesbian in her 30s. Between them, she and
Rudd have five grown children and 15 grandchildren.
Bill Keller is a former executive editor of The Times. He
writes a column for the Op­-Ed page.
EDITOR: Greg Veis
Kitty Lambert, who now goes by Lambert­-Rudd, got to
know Grisanti pretty well during months of lobbying
him on the marriage bill, as he struggled with the
tension between his Catholic faith and his lawyer’s
reverence for equality. The lawyer won. (“I swore with
my hand on the Bible to uphold the Constitution,” he
told me. “I didn’t swear with my hand on the
Constitution to uphold the Bible.”) Lambert­-Rudd
became so protective of the senator that she began a
campaign to register like­-minded Buffalo residents as
members of the Conservative Party, hoping they could
fend off Mike Long’s reprisals. She signed up about
300. This, someone joked, was like getting rabbis to
enroll in Hamas to make it less hostile to Israel.I
wondered how she felt about laboring to save the
political skin of a conservative Republican who
disagreed with her on abortion rights and a slew of
other issues.
“Mark’s politics,” she said. “Wow. But I made a
commitment to support anyone who recognized my
rights as a gay person. Because that is my calling right
now, it tends to be my full focus.”
Not surprisingly, gay marriage is more likely to be a
decisive issue for gays than for opponents. But if you
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