Tuesday night Minneapolis' I-35W bridge lit in honor of the marriage equality victory
Late yesterday Minnesota's senate (37-30) followed the house (75-59) in passing a marriage equality bill ahead of the governor's promised signature, and this morning that news is nowhere to be found on the front page of the websites of the NYT, the Washington Post, or USA Today. It's the 12th state - plus DC - to achieve marriage equality and many people think the story is already ho-hum. But as a tipping point, Minnesota is huge: the first heartland state to get same-sex marriage through the legislative process. (Iowa got it via judicial ruling.) It is also a stunning turnaround from six months ago, when voters were asked by the likes of local nut Michele Bachmann to confine marriage to one woman + one man. On election day, only six states allowed same-sex couples to marry. Now it's doubled.
God bless the trailblazers back east but many of the gay marriage states cluster at the bottom of a ranking by population: Vermont #49, Delaware #45, Rhode Island #43, New Hampshire #42, and Maine #41. With 5.4 million people, Minnesota is one of the more populous states to get marriage equality.
To understand the state's gay past, read Stewart Van Cleve's Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota.
Below, the state's only out senator and author of the marriage bill, Scott Dibble, begins his speech with 54 seconds of Langston Hughes.
Believe it or not, I used to live in Minnesota. I spent formative years there, and I credit its liberal mindset for creating the wonder that is me. I lived there again a few years ago, and for a while it seemed like it was hardly the same state that I knew: it had grown conservative, and I need not mention the political Shelob, She Who Shall Not Be Named... I was more than thrilled to hear of their pending equal marriage bill, following the referendum vote last autumn, and I know that if I'd been living there Monday I would've been among the celebrating masses. I was always aware of Minneapolis being gay friendly, even when I was younger.
I don't know if you've seen this yet, A Map Showing the Country's Sudden Move Towards Marriage Equality (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/04/gay-rights-marriage-map-gif/64148/) but it's worth a look. Minnesota hasn't been added. It's still under "pending" - but we can fill it in with a red crayon while humming Mendelssohn's Wedding March.
Thank you for making this important enough to place front-and-center on your blog, if newspapers didn't. It might be so ho-hum now that they no longer see it as an eyepopping headline. In a way, strangely, that might be good.
Posted by: Tailor | May 14, 2013 at 03:59 PM