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

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

A Klan member? Holy shit. I wonder how a former Klan member ended up becoming a Democrat? How odd.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

He's been around a long time. Remember, historically, the Democratic Party was, among other things, the Southern/agrarian party, and it was the traditional home of hardcore white Southern racism up through the 1960s, until the George Wallace revolt and Nixon's Southern Strategy induced a permanent schism.

Of course, West Virginia is a particularly odd case, having seceded from Virginia when Virginia seceded from the union; it has some things in common with the South but in other ways more resembles adjoining old industrial and mining states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. My impression is that Byrd's beloved there mostly because of his skills as a pork-chaser.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And both the Wallace movement and Nixon took their cue from LBJ having signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (forty years and a few days ago, if I recall correctly), and being generally in favor of civil rights for black people.

I've always found that remarkable. As failed and nasty a president as Johnson was in some ways, on this issue he stuck his neck out at enormous cost to himself and the Democratic Party, apparently just because it was right.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

That does seem almost out of character -- I suppose he had a bit of a conscience.