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Some good news from out in the states following the Hawaii House's defeat of a civil unions bill.
In New Hampshire, the House Judiciary committee voted to kill an effort to reverse the state's same-sex marriage law that the legislature passed and Gov. Lynch signed last year. It also voted down a call for a public vote on the issue.
In Iowa, where a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality would have to be passed in two consecutive legislative sessions before being voted on by the public (several years from now), two "discharge petition"-type efforts failed this morning to pull a constitutional amendment out of committee in both houses of the legislature. The measure, like a discharge petition in the U.S. House of Representatives, would have required a majority number of signatures to pull the bill out of committee. As OpenLefter desmoinesdem reported at Bleeding Heartland yesterday, 62% of Iowans think the legislature should focus on issues other than marriage equality.
The one other thing I do want to note is that in the House, all 44 Republicans voted for the petition but only one Democrat supported it, while in the Senate, all 18 Republicans voted for the petition along with only one Democrat out of 32. Like in New York State, a high percentage of the Democratic caucus voted to support marriage equality, while nearly 100% of the GOP caucus voted against it, so hopefully more of the "this is all the Democrats' fault"-type rhetoric that focuses on parties rather than legislators- which I criticized here- on this issue dies down some more, and folks learn to focus on targeting legislators, not parties. Of course, I don't expect to hear "yay for the Democrats" after these wins, since "the Democrats" kept this from succeeding, but perhaps I should. Sometimes it seems folks are content to blame "the Democrats" after losses but refuse to laud them after wins. Funny thing.
As Joe Mirabella noted last month, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the GOP presidential primaries in both early states come 2012.
All in all, good news, and kudos to a number of activists in both states.
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