It has been awhile since my last post because I have been thinking a lot about what went down in the NY Senate on Friday. I watched the debate online and as thrilled as I was that the bill was passed it left me with this weird feeling in my stomach. I watched senators argue and make statements on why they thought same sex marriage should or should not be legal in New York. This debate really made me think and I did a little research. This is what I found....
There are 62 NY Senators. 52 are male and 10 are female. 10 identify themselves as African American, 4 identify themselves as Hispanic/Latino, and 48 identify themselves as caucasian (excuse my spelling I'm at work and the computer language is set to Spanish and I don't know how to change it). So if you break it down to percentages...16% are female, 84% are male, 16% are African American, 6% are Hispanic/Latino, and 78% are caucasian.
I found this information to be astounding. So I did a little more research (they don't give me enough to do at work) and I compared the NY Senate to the rest of NY. In NY 51.4% of the population is female and 48.6 is male. 15.9% is African American, 17.6% is hispanic/Latino, and 65.7% is caucasian.
So if the NY Senate were to be perfectly representative of its population there would have to be 22 more women (22 less men) and 7 more Hispanics/Latinos (7 less caucasians).
First of all, I was surprised at how representative the NY Senate is compared to other state senates throughout the country.
Second of all, I thought of these 10 women and 52 men and how they alone had the power to decide whether or not the same sex couples in NY had the right to marry. There are 19,378,102 people in NY (according to 2010 census)and according to a recent study 2%-13% of the population is homosexual (this number can only be an estimate because there are so many people still in the closet). That means that anywhere from 387,562 to 2,519,153 of New Yorkers are gay. Yet, only a select 62 can vote on whether or not they have the right to marry.
I think that is so sad. There should not be a body of people who are unrepresentative of their constituents deciding their civil rights. Who are we to decide whether or not Joe and Bob or Mary and Susan can get married? We live in a country where Kelsey Grammer can end a 15 year marriage by phone, Larry King can be on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55 hour marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were sleeping with more women than most men do in a lifetime, Hugh Hefner at age 85 is engaged to a 25 year old woman while living with 2 20 year old twins, 53% of Americans get divorced and 30-60% cheat on their spouses. This is a country where people claim marriage is TOO sacred to share the practice with their homosexual brothers and sisters.
To me, the issue of same sex marriage (or any rights for homosexuals for that matter) is not something that should be talked about in the government. This should not even be considered an issue! Don't get me wrong, I was celebrating Friday night when the bill passed in NY. But now, only 7/50 states have legalized same sex marriage. We have a long way to go folks...
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