A contentious gay marriage bill in the
New Jersey Legislature will face a major obstacle to passage on
Thursday, January 7, if its sponsors get their way.
Democratic Senators Loretta Weinberg
and Raymond Lesniak have asked Senate President Richard Codey, a
Democrat from Essex, to hold a floor vote on the bill Thursday.
Democrats control the Senate with two
votes to spare but remain divided on the bill.
The bill was punted back to the Senate
on New Year's Eve when Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts, a Democrat from
Camden, said he had heard enough on the bill and was prepared to put
the bill up for a vote without a committee hearing but added that the
Assembly would not go first in voting for the measure.
“I've advised the Senate sponsors
that, if the bill is passed by the Senate, I am prepared to bring the
bill directly to the Assembly floor for a vote before the end of this
legislative session,” Roberts said in a statement.
Senate sponsors of the bill postponed a
floor vote in December after it limped out of a committee hearing in
hopes that a big win in the Assembly would help boost the bill's
chances of passage in the Senate.
Now the bill is back in the Senate as
Governor Jon Corzine's administration winds down. Governor-elect
Christ Christie, a Republican who opposes gay marriage, assumes
office on January 19.
“Obviously there's a lot of punting
going on,” Codey told the Star-Ledger. “Sounds like a
ballgame, and somebody's got to decide who's going to take the kick.”
Last month, a gay marriage bill in
neighboring New York was killed by its Democratic-controlled Senate.
Most of the New York senators had remained quiet on the issue and the
final tally surprised many Albany watchers.
The fate of the New Jersey bill also
rests on its Democratic-controlled Senate, whose members have kept
quiet on the issue, leaving many to conclude the bill is in serious
jeopardy.
“We're far from dead,” Steven
Goldstein, executive director of Garden State Equality, the state's
largest gay rights group, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“On an issue like marriage equality,
which thousands of key players in the Democratic Party support so
passionately, you predict at your own peril,” he added.