New York judge rules gays have right to marry

NEW YORK — Comparing prohibitions on gay marriage to once-common laws against interracial marriage, a trial court judge in Manhattan ruled Friday that same-sex couples have a right to wed under the state constitution.

Judge Doris Ling-Cohan found in favor of five couples who had sued the city clerk for denying them marriage licenses. But she stayed the decision for 30 days to allow an appeal, which means that same-sex couples will not immediately be able to marry in New York City, the only jurisdiction directly affected by the ruling.

Noting that state laws against interracial marriages remained common into the 1960s, Ling-Cohan wrote that "the fundamental right to marry the person of one's choice may not be denied based on long-standing and deeply held traditional beliefs about appropriate marital partners."

Lambda Legal, the gay rights group that brought the lawsuit, hailed the decision as "historic, well-reasoned and fair." Opponents of same-sex marriage called it an example of judicial overreaching and predicted it would add momentum to their efforts, both in New York and nationally, to pass constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

"This speaks to the need for a marriage protection amendment to put an end to these judicial fire drills by aberrant judges," said Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, who contended that the analogy to interracial marriage is flawed. In the case of a mixed-race couple, he said, "you had two people who met the qualification of marriage, because they were a man and a woman. You weren't changing the definition of the institution."

The case was brought in the state Supreme Court for New York County, which despite its name is an entry-level trial court. Other trial court judges in Albany and Rockland County, N.Y., ruled against same-sex couples in similar cases last year.

"There have been three sets of virtually identical facts and arguments, and two diametrically opposed outcomes" in New York state courts, said Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel, a conservative public interest law group in Orlando, Fla., that filed an amicus brief against same-sex marriage.