Senator Jon Tester of Montana and Jay
Rockefeller of West Virginia are the latest Democratic senators to
speak out on gay marriage.
“Montanans believe in the right to
make a good life for their families,” Tester wrote in a Facebook
post. “How they define a family should be their business and
their business alone. I'm proud to support marriage equality because
no one should be able to tell a Montanan or any American who they can
love and who they can marry.”
As recently as last year, Tester said
he supported civil unions, not marriage, for gay and lesbian couples.
On Monday, Rockefeller urged the
Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA),
calling the 1996 law “discriminatory.”
“Younger people in West Virginia and
even my own children have grown up in a much more equal society and
they rightly push us to question old assumptions – to think deeply
about what it means for all Americans to be created equal,”
Rockefeller, who supported passage of DOMA, said in a statement given
to POLITICO.
“This has been a process for me, but at this point I think it's
clear that DOMA is discriminatory. I'm against discrimination in all
its forms, and I think we can move forward in our progress toward
true equality by repealing DOMA.”
Tester and Rockefeller join a growing
list of U.S. senators who have recently reversed course on the issue,
including Senator Rob
Portman, a Republican from Ohio, and Democratic Senators Claire
McCaskill of Missouri, Mark
Warner of Virginia and Mark
Begich of Alaska.