Don't have much to add to this except I am also a straight man from a family of straight folks who support Marriage Equality and just don't get this whole homophobic anti-gay marriage movement:

What I don't understand is how two consenting adults loving each other threatens anyone else? My marriage isn't threatened if gays can marry!

The Bronx State Supreme Court - which is not the same thing as the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals - in a ruling issued Tuesday backed governor Paterson's executive order to state agencies to recognize out-of-state marriage licenses for same-sex couples.

The New York Times:

The decision, issued by Justice Lucy A. Billings of State Supreme Court in the Bronx, a trial-level court, is the latest in a string of rulings by state courts that have upheld the right of same-sex couples who were married in other jurisdictions to have their marital status recognized in New York, even though gay couples may not marry within the state. A bill to allow gay unions passed the State Assembly last year but has not come up for a vote in the Senate.

The suit was filed in June by lawmakers who opposed the governor’s order and by other opponents of same-sex marriage, who argued that Mr. Paterson had effectively usurped the Legislature’s role by issuing the order. The governor said the order, issued in May, was made to protect the state from litigation by gay couples legally married in places like Canada or Massachusetts.

The decision was rendered in a suit filed by Serph Maltese, Marty Golden and the virulently bigoted Alliance Defense Fund, and will now probably be appealed through the state court system by deep-pocketed extremist interests allied with the embattled Senator Maltese.

Ironically, Maltese and the other dead-enders who joined his suit have only to look to their own party's convention, currently unfolding fitfully in St. Paul, to see a shifting tide.

A group of gay and lesbian Republicans has traveled to the site of the GOP convention this week to help convince its party that it is time to stop being on the "wrong side" of the same-sex marriage issue.

"Clearly, the tide is turning," said Scott Tucker, communications director for the Log Cabin Republicans. "It's important for the Republican Party to be inclusive on this issue, because we are risk of being on the wrong side of history."

New York republicans aware of this state's demographics like to pretend that they're not quite the same people as their extremist, hateful cohorts in other states. They're the reasonable ones, supposedly.

Problem is, that's just not true.

New York City has only one Republican Congressional Rep, Bush Lap Dog Vito Fossella. This guy opposes securing America's ports, flip flops on privatization of Social Security, and has voted to support Bush's Iraq quagmire at every opportunity. Fossella has voted the Bush Republican Party line more than 90% of the time. Hence his designation as Bush Lap Dog.

Here is what the NY Times had to say about Vito Fossella in 2006:

He has been a real water-carrier for the Bush administration and the Republican leadership, staunchly backing the war in Iraq while at the same time denying health benefits to National Guard and Reserve members who make up much of the American force there.

Rock Hackshaw has a piece on marriage equality up, here, that I'm going to have to comment on. He's wrong, in my considered opinion, but wrong in a way that is instructive.

First, we need to acknowledge that the opposition to marriage equality is not even, in that sense, about marriage. It is about the acceptance of gays and lesbians in our society. That's the often enough unspoken context of this debate; one eschewed by advocates, who prefer to merely address the charges made by opponents, and by the opponents themselves, who often enough make their case not with actual gays and lesbians, but with the depraved hordes that they believe lie in wait beyond our ranks: the polygamists, the bestialists, and so on.

So it is in this case as well. I'll say to the charge that marriage equality opens the floodgates to polygamy and what not else simply this: show me the people who are demanding that. Then demonstrate to me that marriage equality will have the consequences you point to. You won't be able to, for one very simple reason: there is no constituency arguing on behalf of, say, bestiality, and your argument essentially comes down to the assertion, unproven and unprovable, that any change in the institution of marriage will destroy it. That's a non-sensical claim; the institution will be strengthened, not weakened, when a new class of citizens joins it. Marriage has undergone significant shifts over the past century, beginning with the end of the idea of marriage as a life-long contract. Whether that's good or not is another subject; but the institution's continued vitality is demonstrated, I think, by the fact that gays and lesbians care enough about it to want to join in its practice.

Recently, the New York State Assembly narrowly passed legislation favoring same-sex marriages, despite the fact that a federal statute (Defense of Marriage Act) legally defines marriage as strictly between a man and a woman. Proponents of this measure have argued that it’s about equality, civil-rights, justice and human-rights for all; but is it really? To me, the same-sex marriage debate is ostensibly an attempt by advocates to redefine traditional marriage, which for eons in civil society, has been in essence: quasi-religious ceremonial arrangements/agreements between men and women; which society, culture, religion and government, sanctioned, blessed, approved, encouraged, formalized, legalized and such; for myriad positive and sensible reasons.

In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled in Romer v. Evans, striking down a homophobic constitutional amendment in the state of Colorado:

We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause, and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Colorado is affirmed.