New York, New York

Aparentemente o Presidente da Câmara quer dizer que não aos casamentos homossexuais, para lhes dizer que sim...

The city's mayor goes deliberately ambivalent

LAST year San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom began handing out marriage licences to any gay couple who wanted one, only to find himself in a mess when California's courts ruled that the licences had no legal validity. Now New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken the opposite line. The Republican mayor is appealing against a lower court's decision allowing the city clerk to issue marriage licences to homosexuals (this contradicted two recent court decisions elsewhere in the state) while at the same time promising to push for a change in New York's laws.
This has brought predictable snorts from his opponents. The city council's Democratic speaker (and would-be mayor), Gifford Miller, has joined the crowd calling the mayor a coward. Another Democrat, Fernando Ferrer, Mr Bloomberg's most serious rival in the next election, calls him “opportunistic”. And a fellow Republican, Thomas Ognibene, who would also like the mayor's job, has called him “spineless”.
Legal recognition of a marriage has many practical consequences in America. There are, according to one gay-rights group, 1,100 federal benefits directly tied to marriage, to say nothing of hundreds more provided by states and private employers, as well as rights connected with inheritance and insurance coverage. All this adds to the homosexuals' argument for recognition of their marriages.
If the case now goes directly to the state's highest court, there will either be a full judicial endorsement of gay marriage, which Mr Bloomberg would endorse, or (more likely) the opposite. At present the state's law, as the plaintiffs acknowledge, is quite clear in not permitting same-sex marriage. However, in ruling in favour of five couples who last summer demanded marriage licences from the city clerk's office, the lower court said the law was unconstitutional on two grounds: failure to provide equal protection (by treating people differently because of their sexual orientation); and failure to provide due process (by failing to allow people the right of privacy to arrange their marriage free of unjustified government interference).
These arguments touch on difficult areas of law, and so far have arisen primarily in abortion and sodomy cases; the results have left neither side really happy. The Bloomberg approach, if successful, might ultimately encourage an endorsement of gay marriage to come about through the legislature, by a change of law backed by political will and public opinion. That will not be easy to achieve. Only a third of the people in New York state, on the evidence of current opinion polls, are in favour of gay marriage.

(in Economist)