New York Senator Ruben Diaz Sr. has
said he will lead an effort to annul the marriages of gay couples
marrying in New York City.
On Sunday, gay
couples helped break a one-day marriage record in New York City
as New York became the sixth – and most populous – state to allow
gay and lesbian couples to marry. Judges who volunteered to
officiate over the weddings waived the customary 24-hour waiting
period.
The National Organization for
Marriage's (NOM) “Let The People Vote” rally in Manhattan drew
about 3,000 people who marched from Governor Andrew Cuomo's Manhattan
office to the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the United Nations, where
Diaz, also a Pentecostal minister, addressed the crowd.
Diaz said Mayor Michael Bloomberg was
breaking the law by waiving the waiting period without a good reason.
“We're going to show them next week
that everything they did today is criminal and it's wrong,” Diaz
said in Spanish. “Today we start the battle! Today we start the
war!”
NOM also held rallies in Albany,
Rochester and Buffalo.
In Albany, NOM president Brian Brown
told a crowd of roughly 400 that lawmakers had “put into statute a
lie,” the
Times-Union reported.
(Related: Anti-gay
marriage group legally challenges New York's marriage equality law.)