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“I knew that that wasn’t going to work,” O’Donnell said. Tom Duane, Assembly Member Deborah Glick and other gay legislators had kept their partners out of politics. And we needed to find four Republican yeses, two years after we lost in a Senate that was controlled by Democrats? It was quite a herculean feat.”įor O’Donnell, one of six openly LGBTQ lawmakers serving in the state Legislature at the time, the way to win was to make it more personal: Previously, he said, state Sen. They didn’t even think the Senate majority leader would bring it to a vote. “No one thought that we could get it done with a Senate that was controlled by Republicans. “We had the opposite of momentum,” said Brian Ellner, who left then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office in 2011 to help lead New Yorkers for Marriage Equality. Not only had they lost in New York in 2009, but that same year a same-sex marriage bill signed into law in Maine was overturned in a voter referendum. The time was right, but advocates knew they had to strategize differently. “We ended up harnessing about 125,000 constituent contacts for what I know is one of the largest grassroots campaigns in terms of numbers, especially in the LGBT civil rights movement.”
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“We built this huge campaign over time, over six months,” David Contreras Turley, then-associate regional field director at HRC, told City and State New York in 2019. They targeted regions across the state, from the Hudson Valley to the Capital Region, to garner support from constituents. With that mandate, activists got to work: The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, partnered with Freedom to Marry, a national organization, and Empire State Pride Agenda, a statewide LGBTQ group, to form New Yorkers United for Marriage, an umbrella group laser-focused on getting legislation passed. 5, 2011, in his first State of the State address, Cuomo promised same-sex marriage legislation would pass that year. And we’re going to get that done together.” Attempting a ‘herculean feat’ “I want to be the governor who signs the law that makes equality a reality in the state of New York. “I don’t want to be the governor who just fights for marriage equality,” he told attendees at an Empire State Pride Agenda dinner in fall 2010, the Observer reported then. “Then we get Cuomo: Here was a guy who was willing to make marriage a priority.”Ĭuomo had first publicly supported same-sex marriage when he successfully ran for attorney general in 2006. Paterson, and he had no political juice,” Assembly Member Daniel O’Donnell, who introduced five marriage bills over four years, said. Spitzer, and he kind of crashed and burned.