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Tonight, Union County Freeholders passed 8-0 a solid endorsement of marriage equality, and a call for the NJ legislature to pass Freedom of Religion and Equality in Civil Marriage Act, the marriage equality bill that the NJ Senate Judiciary Committee heard nearly eight hours of testimony on just days ago, the day that more than one thousand people appeared at the statehouse for equality, against just a few dozen against. One member was absent in tonight's vote.
New Jersey is a diverse state. But Union County is a more diverse county even than the state's average, with a significant Catholic population. Given that considerable organized opposition to marriage equality comes from the Catholic infrastructure, with reports of bishops requiring priests to distribute literature denouncing marriage equality to parishioners and asking for prayer against it, Union County's action is a powerful statement that the Freeholders representing more than half a million New Jerseyans won't cave to that.
Are there more resolutions like this in the works?
The resolution, introduced by Freeholder Chair Al Mirabella, describes the County as proud to be a place that welcomes and invites people of all backgrounds, faiths, races, nationalities, ethnicities, status, sex, sexual orientation, or gender, to access its government services, its public agencies, and its communities.
The resolution lauds the marriage equality bill, its bi-partisan support in the Senate Judiciary Committee and its ability to provide the same access to a civil marriage certificate or license in New Jersey, at the same time protecting the rights of religious institutions to practice as they wish. And that civil unions have failed to provide same-sex couples equal access to the rights, privileges and benefits of civil marriage, because the word marriage is what everyone understands. The intense and thorough study of the Civil Unions Review Commission's findings on the inequality of that institution is cited, just as dozens of couples testified about before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The full text of the Resolution is here (in the extended text, after the jump).
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