...And That Makes 50!

Just yesterday I was speculating on whether or not we would be hitting a majority of the United States Senate supporting gay marriage soon, and it took less than 24 hours, and it has been done!

The first senator to turn was actually the Number One Seed in the initial Top 10 list, so it's nice to see my predicting skills validated.  Sen. Tom Carper, a three-term U.S. Senator and former governor of Delaware (home of Vice President Joe Biden, who deserves a lot of credit for kicking off this avalanche of support), by far the oddest of the holdouts (though not a hardcore liberal, he's definitely a left-of-the-middle Democrat from a predominantly blue state), finally endorsed this morning.  This brings the number of Democrats who don't support down to seven, and unless Bill Nelson or Joe Donnelly surprise in the upcoming days, this is likely the end of the road for a while as far as Democrats announcing support (though I'd love to be proven wrong, senators, so keep making my day!)

The second senator I didn't have in the initial lineup of Democrats, and that's because he's a Republican.  Sen. Mark Kirk, a very recent convert on gay rights, came out in favor of gay marriage this morning.  Sen. Kirk is from Illinois, and represents the bluest state of any sitting Republican senator, so this isn't a complete surprise, but his dodgy past on gay rights issues (he backed DADT twice in the House before finally voting to overturn it in the Senate) made this a little surprising, as I was assuming that Sen. Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowksi, both with stronger moderate credentials than Kirk, would be the next.  I suspect that one of the two of them will be the next to change (even over the remaining Democrats), though the timing of that seems up in the air.

And as I mentioned in the title, we are now at fifty.  Again, this doesn't mean that we'll be seeing gay marriage pass through the Senate soon (it wouldn't make it through the House, where only about 180 members support gay marriage), but it is a strong show of what direction the country is going on the issue.  I'll continue to update as we get more news, but this is a big day for the same-sex marriage movement.