New York stands up for equal marriage rights

I've been offline, so just finding this out. Blow me over with the wind off a butterfly's wings. My tweetstream had me convinced this wasn't going to happen, but hot damn. New York passes equal marriage rights:

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

This isn't an issue I follow all that closely so I didn't know this:

New York joins Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia as the only places in the U.S. where same-sex couples can get legally married.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that not all of those states followed the same path. New York joins Vermont as the only states in the nation that approved marriage equality because they wanted to — the others approved measures under court order. In other words, policymakers in New York, just as in Vermont, legalized same-sex marriage because they thought it was the right thing to do, not because a judge told them they had to.

Final vote was 33 to 29, which I guess doesn't sound that big but I expected it to be closer than that. Good for the GOPers who bravely crossed the line into sanity.

I have only one quibble. I wish people would stop calling it gay marriage rights. Even same-sex, which is more accuratedly descriptive, makes it sounds like something extraordinary that must be ceded to this community when in fact, marriage is a basic human right for everyone. Thinking equal marriage rights is the best framing.

That aside -- Yeah! Congrats to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen.