NO! But before getting into it…

I linked yesterday to Marion Barry’s “We may have a Civil War” over gay marriage quote. Ta-Nehisi Coates puts Barry & his quote in some much-needed perspective:

I don’t think that can be said loudly enough. There are 12 members of the City Council. Seven of them are black. One is Marion Barry. To anyone who’s followed Barry’s career, I’m not sure why “Marion Barry Is A Demagogue” is breaking news. It’s really wrong to erase the other six votes on that measure, and make Barry the face of blacks on the Council, and blacks in the City.

Here’s something else–consider the fact that D.C. is in the South. Not the deep South, but the South all the same. It’s bordered by two slave states, and one Confederate state. I can’t think of any other southern jurisdiction that’s gone this far on gay marriage. To the contrary, most Southern states have set about the business of a constitutional ban.

That leaves with a very uncomfortable fact–the most progressive place for gays in the South, is also the blackest.

On the Congress question, HRC reports House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that Congress shouldn’t intervene to overturn the DC bill passed Tuesday by city council recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. (She also said that she wouldn’t be trying to repeal DOMA.) David Waldman explains in detail why Congress is likely to follow Pelosi’s lead. He starts out quoting the Washington Blade:

In drafting and approving the Home Rule charter in the early 1970s, Congress created a process for overturning city laws through a direct disapproval resolution. A disapproval resolution initially required a simple majority vote by either the House or Senate. A court ruling later forced Congress to change the process by requiring both the House and Senate to pass a disapproval resolution and for the president to sign it.

Capitol Hill observers note the disapproval resolution used to kill the bill that would have repealed the city’s sodomy law in 1981 may have been among the last times Congress used the process to overturn a D.C. law. Since that time, lawmakers opposed to a number of D.C. laws — including the city’s first domestic partnership law — have used the D.C. appropriations bill to address bills passed by the Council.

Throughout the last decade, Congress amended the D.C. appropriations bill to overturn city-approved bills to legalize medical-related use of marijuana and distribute syringes to intravenous drug users to curtail the spread of HIV, among other measures.

Gay rights and AIDS policy advocate Carl Schmid, who has worked on issues pending before Congress for more than 10 years, has said congressional opponents of proposed D.C. laws learned it’s easier to block bills through the appropriations process because Congress has to pass an appropriations bill each year to approve the city’s funding and budget.

But Capitol Hill observers note that passing a disapproval resolution is much more difficult in a Democratic-controlled Congress, when the Democratic chairs of key committees where a disapproval resolution would have to pass would likely block such a resolution.

Waldman concludes that even though “wherever the issue of same sex marriage comes up, there are wavering Democrats to be found… The likelihood that they’ll win over enough Blue Dogs and other nervous Democrats, though, is probably pretty slim.”