by Jeremy Leaming
Though leaders of the Maryland Senate have delayed consideration of Gov. Martin O’Malley’s marriage equality bill, The Washington Post reports the measure is still expected to pass the chamber and reach the governor by week’s end.
The Senate’s Minority Whip Edward R. Reilly (R-Anne Arundel), the newspaper reports, obtained the delay so amendments to the equality measure could be prepared. Senate President Thomas Miller Jr. said he expects the measure to pass the Senate, as it did last year.
O’Malley (pictured) is pushing hard to add Maryland to the list of states that have lega
lized same-sex marriage. Following last week’s approval of the measure by the Maryland House of Delegates, the governor said “we’re prepared to redouble our efforts” as the Senate considers the measure.
“The common thread,” he continued, “running through our efforts together in Maryland is the thread of human dignity; the dignity of work, the dignity of faith, the dignity of family, the dignity of every individual.”
As in Washington, where Gov. Chris Gregoire recently enacted marriage equality legislation, Christian evangelical lobbyists in Maryland are vowing to drag marriage equality before voters, if need be.
The Maryland Marriage Alliance, representing a gaggle of Christian evangelical interests, is loudly arguing that marriage must remain exclusive to men and women. In a missive on the group’s website, it claims that houses of worship that refuse to conduct weddings for gays and lesbians will place their tax benefits in jeopardy. Maryland’s equality bill, however, contains and exemption for houses of worship, much like the one that passed last year in New York. The Md. bill explicitly states that houses of worship, which receive generous government tax benefits, can play be different rules, and discriminate against gays and lesbians if they wish.
us Right activists are vowing to topple the Washington law, by placing it before voters.
Washington state did not place the effort to advance equality before the whims of voters. Today at the Washington Capitol, 
On that score, Proposition 8 could not survive, for a very simple reason. The interests that were offered in support of denying marriage status to same-sex couples were not relevant to the actual inequality that Proposition 8 created. As the court recognized, Proposition 8 affected only the status of marriage, not the legal infrastructure supporting families headed by same-sex couples. The word “only” does not at all mean that the denial of this status is unimportant to either side of this debate. But it does confine the court’s equal protection inquiry to just those state interests that could be said to justify this denial of the title of marriage. The court rightly recognized that broad assertions of state interests that might arguably be served by restricting same-sex households and families were simply not germane to Proposition 8 itself, because that proposition did not have any effect on the surviving bundle of property, parenting, and companionship rights that support those households and families. The state was called upon to offer a non-hostility-based rationale for leaving same-sex households legally intact while denying them the status of marriage. The court found none.