Wedding bells rang across the Garden State Monday morning, shortly after New Jersey became the 14th state to allow same-sex marriages. The state began performing same-sex weddings just after midnight on Monday morning.
In Newark, Mayor Cory Booker, who won election to the US Senate last week, officiated the weddings of several couples. At one point when Booker asked if anybody objected, a heckler yelled, “This is unlawful in the eyes of God and Jesus Christ.” Booker had the protester escorted out and then proceeded to marry the couple, after remarking,
“…not hearing any substantive and worthy objections”, to a raucous chorus of applause.
New Jersey joins 13 other states and the District of Columbia in making same-sex marriage legal. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Maine, Washington, California, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maryland, Minnesota, and New Jersey have all legalized same-sex weddings. All fourteen states are states which Barack Obama carried in both 2008 and 2012.
Over half of the 14, (8), states passed laws legalizing same-sex marriage in the past year. New Jersey becomes the third most populous state to legalize same-sex marriage, behind California and New York.
While the forces of bigotry will no doubt continue to resist progress, they will likely be relegated to feeble irrelevance like the heckler who feverishly tried to disrupt the marriage in Newark, before being escorted out by police. The tide of history has turned towards equality, and the course appears irreversible.
Edited by SS
