After years of fighting for marriage equality, a local gay-rights champion was finally married this week.
New York State Assembly member Daniel O’Donnell, the first openly gay man to be elected to the New York State Assembly, married his partner of 31 years, John Banta, on Sunday.
O’Donnell, who lives in Morningside Heights and represents parts of the Upper West Side, Manhattan Valley, and Morningside Heights, was the legislative sponsor of the Marriage Equality Act, signed into law last June. That law legalized same-sex marriage in New York and granted gay couples the same marriage rights, responsibilities, and protections as heterosexual couples.
O’Donnell and Banta got engaged just minutes after the state legislature passed the act in June.
They were married on Sunday by Judith Kaye, the former chief justice of the state Court of Appeals, at Guastavino’s, the Upper East Side restaurant. At the ceremony, Kaye recalled O’Donnell urging his fellow Assembly members to pass the bill so that he could experience the same thing many of them had done “two or three times.”
The wedding was followed by a disco dancing party for more than 400 people, including O’Donnell’s sister, actress and comedienne Rosie O’Donnell. On Tuesday, O’Donnell and Banta left for their honeymoon in Paris.
The gay-marriage bill has been a long time in the making—it was initially passed by the Assembly, but not by the State Senate, in 2007. O’Donnell and other proponents led the bill to passage in the Assembly twice in 2009, only to see it stalled again in the Senate. In his fourth attempt, O’Donnell was successful in passing the bill in both the Assembly and Senate, and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it into law on June 24.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Passing the Marriage Equality Act was a moment of victory for O’Donnell and the gay-rights movement. But O’Donnell stressed that there was more progress to be made, including at the federal level. He said he viewed the decision of President Barack Obama, CC ’83, to no longer defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act—which establishes that only the marriage between a man and a woman is legitimate and refuses same-sex couples any federal benefits—as a watershed moment.
“Standing next to John when President Obama passed the law was an absolute feeling of euphoria,” O’Donnell said.
He said he’s pleased with the headway the gay-rights movement is making.
“Now we have the right to get married, to have a marriage license. Younger people are accepting it more now, which shows that we are moving in the right direction. We’ve come along all this way and things are moving forward,” O’Donnell said.
For O’Donnell, the next step is legalizing same-sex marriage in other states, so same-sex couples can have their rights recognized by the federal government.
“We don’t share the same legal rights as straight couples do,” O’Donnell said. “We need to get more people openly gay and lesbian in the congress, so we’ll be able to change some of the conversation at the federal level.”
Matt Martinez, CC ’13 and president of the Columbia Queer Alliance, said the next steps for the LGBT movement will be a two-fold process, at the state level as well as at the federal level.
“One step is getting more states to pass laws in favor of marriage equality for all citizens, which we will hopefully see soon in Washington, Maryland, and Maine,” Martinez said. “This leadership shown by governors for marriage equality, which I believe was sparked with Governor Cuomo’s determination to pass marriage equality in New York, is, I think, a powerful new force that many states will be utilizing in the future.”
Late Wednesday night, the Washington State Senate passed a similar bill to New York’s, almost guaranteeing it would become the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriage, according to the New York Times.
MORE THAN MARRIAGE
But gay rights goes beyond just marriage. Barry Weinberg, CC ’12 and co-president of Everyone Allied Against Homophobia, said that the future of the gay rights movement needs to focus more on the daily battle against discrimination toward LGBT individuals and expand the idea of equality.
“Marriage is a very big symbolic issue, but lots of things affect lots more people on a day-to-day basis than marriage,” Weinberg said. “And it’s dealing with these things and dealing with education, and sort of very visible tolerance saying that discrimination is not acceptable. Those are really the sort of fundamental day-to-day victories that the movement will have to keep fighting for.”
Some of the daily issues related to discrimination that need to be addressed, Weinberg said, include protection for LGBT individuals to express their orientation or gender without fear of being displaced from homes, fired from a job, or attacked on the street. Weinberg said state and local LGBT groups have been focusing on issues like these.
“It’ll be a lot about protecting everyone under this spectrum, especially the most vulnerable. It’ll be dealing with those populations whose needs are unmet,” Weinberg added.
O’Donnell also worked on a comprehensive anti-bullying bill for state public schools. He is the main sponsor for the Dignity for All Students Act, an anti-bullying bill that was signed into law in September 2010. The law, which comes into full effect on July 1, 2012, protects students from bullying and harassment, and was one of the first laws in state history to include gender identity and expression as protected categories.
“State school environments are very important, and extending that to college environment would also be very important,” O’Donnell said. “We need to do a better job at protecting our children.”
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