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DURHAM -- A unanimous City Council this week said it supports extending civil-marriage rights to same-sex couples.
The vote -- taken at the request of local activist Joshua Lee Weaver -- endorsed an advisory resolution that says the "continued refusal to recognize same-sex marriages denies individuals involved in same-sex relationships the import legal benefits, rights and responsibilities of civil marriage that are available to heterosexual couples."
Weaver first approached the council about the resolution in March, and recently renewed his push for it. He attended the council's Aug. 6 work session and asked members to vote on it immediately.
The council instead opted to wait for this Monday's televised meeting. Facing an agenda laden with other issues, they opted to vote without opening the floor for public comment.
Eight people had signed up to speak. Six told clerks they were in favor. The other two also signaled support when Mayor Bill Bell read off their names.
Council members Diane Catotti, Mike Woodard, Eugene Brown and Howard Clement all suggested an immediate vote. Local activist Victoria Peterson, a gay-rights critic, complained, but Bell cut her off.
"I'm running the meeting," he told her, noting that the council hadn't scheduled a public hearing on the resolution.
The resulting vote drew applause from about 50 people who had packed the chamber to support the measure.
The vote did not, however, change the underlying reality that the N.C. General Assembly has full control over the issue. The city government has no formal role in marriage, and the county has only limited involvement through its elected register of deeds.
State Sen. Floyd McKissick, D-Durham, said there "has not been any groundswell of opinion in the General Assembly to move forward with legislation in this area," even to the extent of expanding benefits for domestic partners, like the city government has.
McKissick added that among legislative delegations, there's little apparent support for same-sex civil marriage outside those from the state's major cities.
"In many small towns, medium-sized cities and more rural parts of the state, there's unlikely to be receptiveness to discussing those types of issues," McKissick said. "In fact, there could be outright hostility to even raising them."
Legislators are considering a bill that would give town and city mayors like Bell the power to marry people. It cleared the state Senate in mid-May on a 35-9 vote, but quickly stalled in the House.
There, House Speaker Joe Hackney, D-Orange, assigned it a sequential review by two committees, a tactic legislative strategists sometimes use to slow debate. The measure is, however, eligible for consideration next year.
McKissick indicated that marriage-by-mayor and similar bills calling for an expansion of the number of people who can officiate at weddings have gotten tied up in the politics of same-sex marriage.
Legislators are worried that "more conservative members" of the General Assembly would try to attach to them an amendment to the state constitution that would say marriage could only be between a man and a woman, McKissick said.
To avoid "getting involved in that type of controversy," it "was believed in the minds of many that we didn't need to perhaps deal with bills that might have gone further into those types of issues," he said.
