Thursday, May 07, 2009



Equality wins in Maine

The Governor of Maine has signed that state's same-sex marriage bill, making it the fifth state in the USA (and the fourth in New England) to allow full equality to marry regardless of sexual orientation. New Hampshire will hopefully follow in the next few days, leaving Rhode Island the only holdout in New England. New York is likely to follow within a month or two.

It's good to see this tide sweeping America. There is simply no principled argument for forbidding same-sex marriages, any more than there is for forbidding interracial marriages (something "red" America was also once quite keen on banning, and which shamefully took until 2000 to be finally expunged from the statute books in redneck Alabama). If the state registers marriages for anyone, it has to register them for all, regardless of race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.