N.Y. Town's Mayor Charged in Gay Weddings

Yoda

Things are heating up in New York, it seems.

N.Y. Town's Mayor Charged in Gay Weddings
By MICHAEL HILL

NEW PALTZ, N.Y. (AP) - The village's mayor was charged Tuesday with 19 criminal counts for performing marriage ceremonies for gay couples.

Jason West was charged with solemnizing marriages for couples who had no licenses, a misdemeanor under the domestic relations law, according to Ulster County District Attorney Donald Williams.

Although West could face a maximum penalty of a year in jail, the prosecutor said a jail term wasn't being contemplated at this point.

The 26-year-old Green Party mayor said he will plead innocent at his court hearing Wednesday and that he would still go through with his plans to marry as many as two dozen gay couples Saturday.

"I'm incredibly disappointed," West said. "Apparently, it's a crime to uphold the constitution of New York state."

West performed wedding ceremonies for 25 gay couples Friday, making him the second mayor in the country to perform same-sex marriages. It also made this small college village 75 miles north of New York City another flash point in the national debate over gay marriage. More than 3,400 couples have been married in San Francisco and West has about 1,000 couples on a waiting list.

Absent jail, punishment for the misdemeanor could run from a $25 to $500 fine. Williams said he still did not know whether West performed the marriages of his own accord or after getting bad legal advice.

"If he's doing it sincerely out of a moral conviction and out of some naive misunderstanding of the law, then that would enter into the equation," the prosecutor said.

Williams said the misdemeanor complaint lists 19 charges - instead of 25 for the number of weddings performed - because police at the scene provided eyewitness accounts of only 19 ceremonies. He said more charges are possible.

With West vowing to go through with more gay weddings, opponents had hoped Williams would act to stop him. But he said he did not have the legal power to do that, only to file charges after the fact.

West said the prospect of further punishment does not deter him, adding that the newlywed couples inspire him.

"Just the looks on their faces, just the absolute joy of finally being able to be equal," he said. "That is the highest moral calling I could possibly imagine."

State Sen. Thomas Duane, a Manhattan Democrat and one of three openly gay state lawmakers, called Williams' actions "malicious."

"Does the Ulster County D.A. really want to put someone in jail for recognizing long-term relationships between people?" he said. "Does he really want to put in jail someone who recognizes same-sex families? Really, the Ulster County D.A. should be prosecuted for malicious prosecution, which is a felony in New York."

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if you cant be bothered reading it all

George Saunders proposes the Samish-Sex Amendment, intended to ensure the freedom of all Americans to not be married to feminine men or masculine women. "I, for one, am not about to stand by and let that happen

posted in the New Yorker

MY AMENDMENT
by GEORGE SAUNDERS
Issue of 2004-03-08
Posted 2004-03-01
A s an obscure, middle-aged, heterosexual short-story writer, I am often asked, George, do you have any feelings about Same-Sex Marriage?

To which I answer, Actually, yes, I do.

Like any sane person, I am against Same-Sex Marriage, and in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban it.

To tell the truth, I feel that, in the interest of moral rigor, it is necessary for us to go a step further, which is why I would like to propose a supplementary constitutional amendment.

In the town where I live, I have frequently observed a phenomenon I have come to think of as Samish-Sex Marriage. Take, for example, K, a male friend of mine, of slight build, with a ponytail. K is married to S, a tall, stocky female with extremely short hair, almost a crewcut. Often, while watching K play with his own ponytail as S towers over him, I have wondered, Isn’t it odd that this somewhat effeminate man should be married to this somewhat masculine woman? Is K not, on some level, imperfectly expressing a slight latent desire to be married to a man? And is not S, on some level, imperfectly expressing a slight latent desire to be married to a woman?

Then I ask myself, Is this truly what God had in mind?

Take the case of L, a female friend with a deep, booming voice. I have often found myself looking askance at her husband, H. Though H is basically pretty masculine, having neither a ponytail nor a tight feminine derrière like K, still I wonder: H, when you are having marital relations with L, and she calls out your name in that deep, booming, nearly male voice, and you continue having marital relations with her (i.e., you are not “turned off”), does this not imply that you, H, are, in fact, still “turned on”? And doesn’t this indicate that, on some level, you, H, have a slight latent desire to make love to a man?

Or consider the case of T, a male friend with an extremely small penis. (We attend the same gym.) He is married to O, an average-looking woman who knows how to fix cars. I wonder about O. How does she know so much about cars? Is she not, by tolerating this non-car-fixing, short-penised friend of mine, indicating that, on some level, she wouldn’t mind being married to a woman, and is therefore, perhaps, a tiny bit functionally gay?

And what about T? Doesn’t the fact that T can stand there in the shower room at our gym, confidently towelling off his tiny unit, while O is at home changing their sparkplugs with alacrity, indicate that it is only a short stroll down a slippery slope before he is completely happy being the “girl” in their relationship, from which it is only a small fey hop down the same slope before T is happily married to another man, perhaps my car mechanic, a handsome Portuguese fellow I shall refer to as J?

Because my feeling is, when God made man and woman He had something very specific in mind. It goes without saying that He did not want men marrying men, or women marrying women, but also what He did not want, in my view, was feminine men marrying masculine women.

Which is why I developed my Manly Scale of Absolute Gender.

Using my Scale, which assigns numerical values according to a set of masculine and feminine characteristics, it is now easy to determine how Manly a man is and how Fem a woman is, and therefore how close to a Samish-Sex Marriage a given marriage is.

Here’s how it works. Say we determine that a man is an 8 on the Manly Scale, with 10 being the most Manly of all and 0 basically a Neuter. And say we determine that his fiancée is a -6 on the Manly Scale, with a -10 being the most Fem of all. Calculating the difference between the man’s rating and the woman’s rating—the Gender Differential—we see that this proposed union is not, in fact, a Samish-Sex Marriage, which I have defined as “any marriage for which the Gender Differential is less than or equal to 10 points.”

rest of the article here See My amendment

imho opinion...he's jealous little man with no love in his life.....

Atreides

What a nut job