Federal Marriage Amendment Defeated!

[chicken]

The anti-gay-marriage people couldn't even muster 50 votes, let alone the 60 they needed to keep the issue alive.

A big thank you to everyone who wrote and called their Senators. I think we helped a lot. Woo!!!

HOWEVER, the House will be debating the same issue next week, so it ain't time to rest, yet.

The YEAs in favor of banning gay marriage only got 48 votes.
The NAYs who opposed the amendment got 50 votes. Neither Kerry nor Edwards voted, although the press says they would have voted against the amendment.

The Republicans who broke rank and voted with the Democrats to oppose the heinous amendment included six Senators:

Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO)
       Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
         Susan Collins (R-ME)
          John McCain (R-AZ)
       Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
          John Sununu (R-NH)

We all expected Chafee to side with gay rights (because Rhode Island Republicans are really almost Democrats), as well as John McCain. And isn't Olympia Snowe an out lesbian or something? If so, why is she a Republican? Could be one of those nutty log cabin republicans.

However, I am quite impressed with Ben Nighthorse Campbell from my own home state of Colorado, who defied his party and his fellow Coloradoan Wayne Allard (the sponsor of the bill) in voting against it. Good man.

There were several Democrats who voted with the Republicans in favor of banning gay marriage, sadly:

Robert Byrd (D-WV)
  Zell Miller (D-GA)
   Ben Nelson (D-NE)

Does anyone know much about these guys' general voting records? Not sure why they voted to ban gay marriage. Shame.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, it's not actually clear that all the Senators who voted the other way were voting for the ban. This was a procedural vote on whether to allow a vote for the amendment. As such, some people may have felt that actually voting the amendment down would have been better than disallowing the vote in the first place. Had the vote gone forward, the amendment likely would have been rejected by a bigger margin; it really was not popular. As it was, most of the Democrats probably voted on the procedural issue at least in part to indicate that they now have their act together sufficiently to perform the kind of procedural obstruction that the Congressional Republicans have been throwing in their way for years. Which is, at the moment, just fine with me.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Wait, please explicate. When you say "the Senators who voted the other way" in your first sentence, to which segment of the Senate are you referring? The ones who voted 'Yea' or the ones who voted 'Nay'? I'm confused and am not parsing English well right now.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The ones who voted against cutting off debate on the amendment.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Okay, thank you, I finally get it. Logic schmogic.