Utah for Marriage? Sure, Why Not?

The hits keep coming, like companies shoving big financial news in after the week's market close, or everyone trying to end the calendar year with some oomph. Now Utah has to obey its nondiscrimination laws and regs by permitting same-sex marriage.

With New Mexico earlier, that's a third of the states (and DC) allowing marriage equality. It's closing in on 40% of the population. The wingers who said a couple of years ago that the SSM battle had been won by the pro-equality forces were smack on.

The anti-gay forces have been funneled down to two sad stances:

• Calls for plebiscites, figuring the regressive, oppressive types will be able to rally at the polls
• Reliance on their panicked, anti-American democracy state one-man/one-woman reactionary laws and amendments

Would the Supremes had said, "Give it up," when they recently had the chance to lead and be rational. The SCOTUS has simply dragged out the inevitable, humane, and rational.

Yeah to New Mexico and to Utah. Welcome to the world of compassion and reason.

Saturday Updates: The governor is fairly soiling his trousers in anger and promises some kind of action. The federal court there denied a state request for an immediate stay, and marriages proceeded. The well-reasoned 53-page judgment is here.

Land of (Equal) Enchantment

OK, we knew it was overdue. Today, New Mexico's high court made it official. The state will widely allow same-sex marriage.

It had been a nether world, or rather a neither world. Its statutes neither forbade nor allowed marriage equality. Meanwhile, various country clerks had taken it on themselves to be American. That is in contrast to the old Soviet Union's cliché of whatever is not allowed if forbidden, ours was whatever is not forbidden is allowed.

Regardless, unlike the many states that panicked when first Hawaii's court noted that its non-discrimination laws implied homosexual couples could marry, then New Hampshire enacted civil unions, and wham, pow, Massachusetts started enabling gay marriage, New Mexico sat and watched. There were no paranoid constitutional amendments nor no homophobic legislation. It waited.

In that sense, it was easier for NM. It didn't have to undo humiliating evidence of hate and stupidity. Good on them.