North Jersey Same-Sex Advocacy Group Celebrates Gay Marriage Ruling

A prominent New Jersey gay rights organization said that now the group can focus on other important issues now same-sex marriage has been legalized across the United States.

“It means that we are deisively moving on to all of the other issues that we’ve had to deal with all of these years,” said Andrea Bowen, executive director of Garden State Equality, a statewide advocacy and education organization for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community based in Montclair.

Those issues include making transgendered people have access to healthcare, ensuring that that gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered older adults are treated with respect, and making sure we address the issue GLBT youth homelessness, Bowen said.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 watershed ruling Friday in favor of gay marriage, resolving the legal issues surrounding one of the most contentious civil rights questions of modern times and ending a decades-long battle for marriage equality fought in state legislatures, courts, and at the ballot box.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that same-sex couples could receive the same rights and benefits heterosexual couples were granted through marriages, but left it up to the state Legislature to determine what it should be called. The Legislature decided to call the term civil union.

Same-sex marriage became law in New Jersey in October 2012 after Gov. Chris Christie conceded defeat in a momentous legal battle that unfolded in state Supreme Court. Cindy Meneghin and Maureen Kilian, a North Jersey couple from Butler, was at the heart of the battle. The couple met 35 years ago at DePaul Catholic High School in Wayne.

Christie, who is expected to announce his 2016 presidential candidacy this week, said that he agreed with Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissenting opinion that the people should make this decision and noted his support and endorsement of New Jersey’s same-sex marriage law, Politico.com reported.

The Republican governor, who vetoed a gay marriage bill last year, abruptly withdrew an appeal being heard by the state’s highest court, clearing the way for full marriage rights for thousands of gay couples in the Garden State.

“This is the kind of thing that I always imagined would happen, but it was something else to see it happening in reality,” Bowen said. “This is a major civil rights victory.”