Assembly Republicans who bucked party leaders and voted to legalize same-sex marriage in New York have been rewarded with an outpouring of donations from gay rights advocates across the nation.
The lawmakers…have benefited from a fund-raising network stretching to at least nine other states. The money has flowed in at such a rapid pace that these Republicans have seen more than half of their individual contributions in the latest filing cycle come from donors with addresses outside the state.
Their donations also far surpassed political giving from the national gay rights movement to Assembly Democrats who voted for the bill, including Democratic members in upstate districts with conservative leanings.
“It was very shocking to me to watch it come in,” a Republican assemblywoman, Teresa Sayward, one of four Republicans who voted in favor of gay marriage, said.
Tim Gill’s strategy pays off. It didn’t hurt that Sayward, a Roman Catholic, had a gay son who “over time she came to accept.” State Republican leaders have reaffirmed their opposition:
A Republican senator of Brooklyn, Martin Golden, said the support received by Assembly Republicans would not influence his conference. “It’s a strong belief among many Republicans that it’s not the way to go. It’s a core belief that we have. We stick with our core beliefs,” he said.
“Many of them are a bunch of fossils from a bygone day,” a Republican assemblyman of Dutchess County, Joel Miller, who also backed the bill, said of the Senate Republicans. “Constituents have changed. More of us represent a district in which there’s a lot more people of diverse views.”
I like Miller! He’s feisty:
Mr. Miller, a dentist who is facing a Democratic challenger, said his Republican colleagues last year urged him not to speak out in favor of gay marriage on the Assembly floor and to wait until the Democrats voted — and the bill’s passage was a foregone conclusion — before placing his vote.
“I wanted it recognized that my vote counted. I told them I was prepared to leave the conference,” Mr. Miller said.
Yesterday in the Sun:
[A] Christian legal group from Arizona will face off against representatives of the governor’s office in the first direct legal challenge to Governor Paterson’s executive order mandating that all state offices recognize out-of-state same-sex unions.
The Alliance Defense Fund is suing Mr. Paterson, citing an online [edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary as evidence that the word “marriage” applies only to a bond between a man and a woman] and claiming that legal recognition of such marriages “will undermine the democratic process and force taxpayer dollars to fund benefits for same-sex couples.”