Green Party Mayor of New York Town Follows Newsome's Lead

Mayor of N.Y. Town Marries Gay Couples

By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer

NEW PALTZ, N.Y. - Twenty-one gay couples exchanged wedding vows on the steps of village hall Friday in a spirited ceremony that opened another front on the growing national debate over gay marriage.

As the ceremonies by 26-year-old Mayor Jason West were ending, the state Health Department asked the attorney general to seek an injunction "to prevent further illegal conduct by the mayor," a department spokesman said.

A call to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office was not immediately returned.

West, elected on the Green Party ticket last year in this village 75 miles north of New York City, joined Gavin Newsom of San Francisco as the country's only mayors to marry same-sex couples.

"What we're witnessing in America today is the flowering of the largest civil rights movement the country's had in a generation," West said.

Protestors were, of course, there -- but sheesh, do they have some uncreative and downright boring protestors there:

One protester stood outside the hall with a sign that read, in part, "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."

"It's against nature," Angelo Da'Quaro said. "It's against religion, it's against all of that."

YAWN!!!!!

And, of course they have to ask NY's only openly gay mayor what he thinks (sigh. yawn.):

Plattsburgh Mayor Daniel Stewart _ New York state's first and only openly gay mayor _ said he will not perform same-sex marriages.

"I believe in changing the law, but I don't believe in breaking the law in order to change it," said Stewart, a Republican.

Dan Stewart's a great guy in person, and he's fun to hang out at the gay bar with, but politically, he's just boring. Oh, and unless he's changed his opinions since I lived there, he's not even for changing the law really (only in favor of Civil Unions, not gay marriage)