Massachusetts has suddenly seen the economic benefits of repealing a 1913 law prohibiting the recognition of out-of-state gay marriages. Its just amazing how people's moral codes become so less stringent and strident when an otherwise intolerable issue position is lubed up with cash incentives. When the prophet sees profit sins will be indulged.
A NYTimes piece called "A 1913 Law Dies to Better Serve Gay Marriages" describes it:
State officials said they expected a multimillion-dollar benefit in weddings and tourism, especially from people who live in New York. A just-released study commissioned by the State of Massachusetts concludes that in the next three years about 32,200 couples would travel here to get married, creating 330 permanent jobs and adding $111 million to the economy, not including spending by wedding guests and tourist activities the weddings might generate.
"We now have this added pressure, given what's happened in California, that we really think that it is a good thing that we be prepared to receive the economic benefit," State Senator Dianne Wilkerson, a Democrat who sponsored the repeal bill, said Tuesday after the vote.
Ms. Wilkerson added, "For me it wasn't the most important basis of the argument, but it certainly is a perk."
Legislators and same-sex marriage advocates said their primary motivation for the repeal was to allow all same-sex couples an opportunity to marry and to revoke a law that many saw as discriminatory. The law, believed to have been designed to uphold other states' bans on interracial marriage, was invoked in 2004 by Gov. Mitt Romney, a same-sex marriage opponent who said he did not want to make Massachusetts "the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage."
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