snarky?

[redbird]

I just sent a letter to the editor to Newsday (it's the paper I read), pointing out Bloomberg's hypocrisy in saying that he's in favor of same-sex marriage, but is appealing against the ruling requiring the city to allow it.

The snarky part is that I didn't just point out that allowing same-sex marriages isn't only a matter of justice: in the short term, it's also a nice boost to tourism. I ended by asking, if he thinks the city can't handle that many visitors, how does he think we can handle the Olympics?

I have no idea if they'll print it: I've had a few letters printed there before, but I expect they'll get a lot of mail on this one.

Comments

[avram]

Is it really hypocritical?

As I understand it, the Hon. Ling-Cohan's ruling applies only to NYC. If the Court of Appeals upholds it, it will apply state-wide. By appealing, Bloomberg is hastening that ruling.

[redbird]

Appealing may not be hypocritical. Claiming that he's appealing because the city couldn't handle the number of people getting married is hypocritical.

I'm also not sure he's hastening anything, since there are rulings in the other direction being appealed.

[cheshyre]

I was particularly taken by his using San Francisco as the example of the chaos that could occur.

Hello!?
The closer parallel is Massachusetts, and we haven't had anything like the chaos he seems to be predicting.

[brooksmoses]

Massachusetts, as I recall, has a law stating that citizens of other states cannot get married in Massachusetts if their marriage would not be legal in their home state. Ergo, "marriage tourism" was never a possibility.

Does New York have a similar law?

(For that matter, was San Francisco actually chaotic in any troubling sense? I don't recall it being so, other than the chaos of marriages getting annulled after the legal dust settled -- which, as agrumer's comment below indicates, might be a chaos more related to Bloomberg's real concerns.)

Marriage tourism

[cheshyre]

Oh, there was some.
That particular law underwent a fair bit of discussion and interpretation. There wasn't universal agreement to its meaning, particularly when people looked at its previous application wrt heterosexual marriages. And not all communities initially agreed to obey it. And shortly after the court decision, Olivia scheduled a cruise ship for that first month: Massachusetts to Canada for marriages at either end.

So there was marriage tourism, it was just so mild as to be relatively unremarkable. Which is why I feel he's blowing it out of proportion.

[avram]

Is that what he said?

I just fed “bloomberg marriage newsday” into Google News, and got an article with the following paragraph:

"What the city doesn't want to have happen is people getting a marriage license and then six months, or one year later, or two years later, finding out it's meaningless," Bloomberg said Monday. "That is not in anybody's interest. I think it is in everybody's interest to have the courts finally decide what our current laws say."

The paragraph immediately preceding that one implies something along the lines of what you’re saying, but contains only a single quoted word from Bloomberg, which falls below the threshold of what I’m willing to consider reliable sourcing. I’ve seen too many cases of journalists inventing a position for somebody by pasting together itty-bitty quote fragments.

I found a couple more Newsday articles on the matter, and I still don’t see anything reliable that says he’s worried about handling the number of marriages.

[brooksmoses]

Hmm. Now that I go read that, I don't think that the "chaos" comment implies anything at all about the number of marriages. The remainder of the paragraph makes it fairly clear that the chaos he refers to in San Franscisco was not the lines of people getting married, but the legal mess afterwards when all the marriages were declared invalid by the state.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a verse about this in "Love Me, I'm a Liberal?" Something about being willing to sign your petition if I don't have to take any risks or pay for anything?

In a related story, the governor of Michigan campaigned against the "defense of marriage amendment" promulgated by that state's anti-gay activists. Shortly after the amendment passed anyhow (making same-sex marriage and civil unions unconstitutional in Michigan), the governor proposed that the state should no longer give benefits to registered domestic partners of state workers. This saved the state quite a bit of money. And why not? The people had made their values clear.