Gottfried at odds with gay electeds on marriage

By Paul Schindler

“Tom and I are coordinating with each other on everything on the bill,” Democratic state Assemblyman Dick Gottfried said about his out gay Chelsea colleague, Senator Tom Duane, and their plan to soon re-introduce the same-sex marriage law they have jointly sponsored since June 2002.

“And I am also in constant conversation with the Pride Agenda, and Marriage Equality, and Freedom to Marry,” Gottfried continued, over lunch on February 9. “And while I may have a different view on some points than Deborah Glick and Danny O’Donnell, I am also in pretty constant touch with them as well.”

“I have in the past tried to convey to Dick whatever concerns I have,” O’Donnell, an out gay assemblyman, said in an interview in his Upper West Side office a week earlier. “It is troubling, deeply, deeply troubling to me that Dick Gottfried would change the laws affecting people like me without either concern or care or even picking up the phone.”

Eight days after that interview — at the Human Rights Campaign Manhattan dinner on February 10 — O’Donnell told this reporter he has since spoken to Gottfried.

Still, the standoff — with Gottfried, on one side, and O’Donnell and the only other LGBT member of the Assembly, Glick, on the other — apparently continues. O’Donnell has declined to renew his co-sponsorship of the marriage bill this year, and after Gottfried’s office released a list of co-sponsors late last month, Glick moved quickly to remove her name as well.

Asked about his decision to move off the Duane-Gottfried measure, O’Donnell responded, “The bill that you referred to has been pending for four years and there has been absolutely no movement at all on the subject. Absolutely no movement. We have to rethink our strategy within the new paradigm that we have a new governor and that we have possibly a state Senate majority that is razor thin and how do we use those two factors to think through this process.”

Noting that the state’s new Democratic chief executive, Eliot Spitzer, has pledged to introduce his own “program bill” legalizing marriage for same-sex couples sometime in 2007, O’Donnell argued, “I think that our best, the best we can do is to keep the pressure on the governor, get the governor to put in a bill, see what the bill says, figure out how to move the bill. Placeholding, or doing it for political expediency, or doing it for political cover is not really moving the issue. It’s moving themselves. If you really want to move the issue, get the governor to put the bill in.”

He added, “Deborah and I think almost identically on this thing. People should hear that.” Indeed, three weeks earlier, Glick made essentially the same arguments as O’Donnell.

Gottfried offered virtually the opposite view on smart strategy.

“I don’t think there is any reason to hold off on putting a bill in, waiting for the governor to put in his bill,” he said. “I very strongly think our success in bringing on a very diverse group of sponsors is going to be very important in convincing the governor to move forward—and you can’t get people to sign on as co-sponsors if there isn’t a bill.”

Contradicting O’Donnell’s assertion of no movement, Gottfried noted that his bill now has 31 Assembly sponsors, up by nine from last year, and including 13 from outside New York City. The Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA) has a running tally showing 52 votes for marriage equality in the 150-member chamber, 24 shy of a majority, but more than two-thirds the way there.

Gottfried made another point that could be construed as a poke at his Manhattan colleagues.

“Other than Glick and O’Donnell, none of my colleagues has said, ‘Between you and me Dick, I’ll go on the bill but not until the governor has given me cover.’” Several weeks ago, the New York Post, citing an unnamed gay source, asserted that Glick and O’Donnell’s non-sponsorship was an effort to take the heat off the Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — who has a large Orthodox Jewish constituency thought to be unreceptive to gay marriage.

As O’Donnell’s words of pique aimed at Gottfried also demonstrate, there is clearly an unfriendly atmosphere pervading the relationship among the three Manhattanites. Glick and O’Donnell squared off against Gottfried last summer, in the pages of the Daily News and Gay City News, over a medical decision-making bill that the two LGBT officials said denigrated the role of domestic partners and also posed a risk to a woman’s right to choose because of language about the rights of a fetus carried by a critically ill mother. Gay turf issues, in particular, clearly divide Glick and O’Donnell from Gottfried.

Asked if he thought there was an effort to wrest sponsorship of the marriage measure from his hands, Gottfried said nobody except journalists have brought up that question.

Many might harbor that thought in their heads, however, along with considerable consternation about the divide among marriage supporters. At the Marriage Equality demonstration outside the city’s Centre Street marriage license bureau on Valentine’s Day morning, several participants lamented the fact that Glick and O’Donnell do not have their names on the only current measure in Albany that would provide them the right to wed their partner.

And despite questions raised by O’Donnell about how much Gottfried had coordinated with other advocates, ESPA is clearly endorsing the effort to get a bill introduced as soon as possible, whether or not Spitzer is prepared to move.

“The Pride Agenda sees no problem with rallying the community in support of the Duane-Gottfried bill before the governor introduces his program bill,” Alan Van Capelle, ESPA’s executive director, told the newspaper on February 14. “It will be a test of the strength of the bill in the Legislature. We don’t know why we would ever not be having conversations with assemblymembers and senators and not waiting for the governor to introduce his bill and having a bill in there now is a way to have those conversations.”

Still, it would appear as though some delay has crept into the process. Contacted the third week in January, both Gottfried and Duane said they planned to move in February, perhaps on Valentine’s Day, dubbed by equality advocates in recent years Freedom to Marry Day. Now, neither Democrat is saying exactly what the time frame is.

Both the divide among the Democrats and the uncertainty about timing speak to a general issue about the efficiency of communications among players in Albany. Gottfried professed to consult “pretty constantly” with Glick and O’Donnell, yet both of have said that they were unaware of his plans until told of them by a reporter. O’Donnell noted he has talked marriage with all the city’s elected gay and lesbian officials, including City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, but he also said that when he told Duane of his concerns about re-introducing a marriage bill now, the senator did not indicate that he planned to do so, despite the fact that he had publicly confirmed exactly that weeks earlier.

Everybody indicated they have been in touch with top aides to the governor since the first of the year (even if not in the week since the flare-up over the choice of a new state comptroller), yet none said they had discussed the marriage issue or could predict Spitzer’s timing. And Glick, Gottfried, and O’Donnell were cautious about speculating where Speaker Silver stood, though Glick said definitively he would move a marriage bill for a floor vote if sponsors could achieve a majority of 76, plus a few extra for comfort, from among the Assembly’s 108 Democrats. The other two Manhattanites were less certain, Gottfried saying, “These issues are not always questions of numbers, they are also questions of intensity.” He hastened to add, however, “In terms of intense opposition, I’d be surprised if there were more than a handful.”

The Assembly, of course, is only one half of the legislative equation. In the state Senate, now controlled by the Republicans, but with a narrowed two-seat majority in the wake of the Nassau special election February 6, marriage equality currently has the support of only 18 of 62 members, 14 short of a majority. How the victory by Craig Johnson, a non-incumbent from Long Island who ran on a pro-marriage platform, and the rumored potential defections by Senate Republicans, particularly in light of a criminal probe into the outside business interests of Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, will affect the calculus is anybody’s guess.

With a Republican majority in the Senate, Assembly passage and strong support from Spitzer are the best advocates are hoping for in the 2007-2008 session of the Legislature. If Senate control changes, it could be a new ball game.