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Let's hear it for Elease Evans, Nellie Pou, Joan Quigley, Pamela Lampitt, Gordon Johnson, and Sandra Cunningham. As reported earlier by both Scott Weingart, who's doing a fantastic job liveblogging the convention for us here at Blue Jersey, and Matt Friedman at PolitickerNJ.com, five members of our legislature stood up to be counted as strong supporters of marriage equality this morning during a presentation by Garden State Equality to our delegation in Denver. We've just added Elease Evans to the list, based on reports from the delegation.
Though there are still doubters, all indications are now that New Jersey will be the third state after Massachusetts and California to guarantee the right to marry for same-sex couples. This kind of momentum, indicated by this morning's surprising development, is incredibly hard to overcome. While civil unions have been a progressive step forward for the cause, New Jersey residents seem to agree that basic civil rights should no longer be denied to a significant portion of our population.
This has been a great week for New Jersey's Democrats. Despite some weird media fixation on whether or not Senator Menendez would be given a speaking role at the Pepsi Center (and everyone knows he'd have delivered the keynote if it were up to me -- and perhaps should have, all things considered), we've seen our share of groundbreaking scenes at this year's convention. Our state's delegation played a big role yesterday, from the morning move to pledge all of our 127 delegates to Barack Obama, to being the last state to have our delegates counted in the roll call before Hillary Clinton's historic motion to nominate Obama by acclamation. It's fitting that six new backers for the marriage equality bill would announce their support at a convention where so much history is being written.
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