Spitzer Comes Out In Favor of Marriage Equality

Democratic Governor hopeful Eliot Spitzer brought some life back into the gay marriage debate here in New York on Thursday night at an event for the Empire State Pride Agenda when he told the audience that "we will make it law in New York."

Considering Spitzer's lead in the polls, his remarks were unexpected if welcome. “We will not ask whether this proposition of legalizing same-sex marriage is popular or unpopular; we will not ask if it’s hard or easy; we will simply ask if it’s right or wrong,” he told the audience according to the Times. “I think we know in this room what the answer to that question is.”

However, if (or when) Spitzer becomes Governor nothing would happen too quickly on the matter. Though a gay marriage bill would be unlikely to have much trouble in the Democrat-heavy State Assembly it would likely suffer in the Republican-controlled State Senate. And of course there are other, more pressing, issues the state needs to resolve. In the words of Empire State Pride Agenda executive director Alan Van Capelle:

“New York has a lot of problems,” he said. “When Eliot Spitzer takes office on January 1, he’s going to have to fix Medicaid reform, there’s school funding, there’s a dragging upstate economy, and he needs to tackle those issues, but I’m confident that at the end of his first term as governor, we’ll have marriage equality in New York State.”

We don't know about you, but we'd like that to be true.

Photo by AP Photo/David Duprey