NY Senator James Alesi (R), one of the few Republican State Senators to vote in favor of Gay Marriage in New York last year, is not running for re-election. His party wants him out. As I think I mentioned at the time, he hasn't always been the most politically savvy person in the book, and he was likely doomed, before, but I guess pretty much it now.
Here's a link to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle forum - if you can get to it - Gannett Rochester is going to subscription only for online.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120513/NEWS0217/305130021?source=nletter-topnews
As civil rights martyrs go, Jim Alesi is pretty much a disaster.
A politician with a taste for having things named after himself and a well-earned reputation as kind of a sleaze, Alesi’s vote in favor of gay marriage helped end his career. It also earned him hero status among a great many people who can’t vote in Republican primaries. 1
People like my mother.
State Sen. Alesi, who announced his retirement this week in the face of near-certain defeat in a hypothetical Republican primary, now has the respect of my mom, her wife and countless others, gay and straight.
He also has a one-way ticket back to East Rochester.
Alesi described his decision to retire as borne out of party loyalty. He wanted, he said, to keep the seat Republican. That’s sort of baffling, given that the party pretty clearly wanted him gone, and also pretty self-serving.
“It’s not really about Jim Alesi,” Alesi said, demonstrating the equal-parts blend of false humility, massive ego and factual inaccuracy that can only be honed over two decades in Albany.
In truth, this really is about Jim Alesi — about how he tried to balance support for gay marriage with his party affiliation and lost his seat in the process. 2
But it’s more complicated than that. Because if Alesi had better real-life balance, maybe we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all. Yes, the great complication in all of this — the thing that makes it so hard to unpack — is Alesi’s undignified fall from a ladder in 2008.
That fall, which happened while Alesi was trespassing inside an unfinished home in Perinton, and the truly deranged lawsuit against the home’s owner and builder that followed dimmed Alesi’s re-election prospects horribly.
That 2011 lawsuit, which Alesi filed the day the statute of limitations for trespassing expired, branded Alesi a slimeball in the eyes of many. He withdrew the suit and apologized, but it was too late. Even without the gay marriage vote the next year, Alesi might have been finished.
Would Alesi still have voted for gay marriage had he not taken that tumble, smashing himself up physically almost as badly as the lawsuit did politically? Watch the video of him voting against a gay marriage bill in 2009 and he certainly looks conflicted. But I still don’t know, and I don’t think Alesi knows.
I also don’t think it matters.
My mother and her partner pledged themselves to each other at a commitment ceremony in 2000, when that was their only option. In 2002, they drove to Vermont to enter a civil union. Last year, they were married in Connecticut, where they live.
“I think I like Jim Alesi,” my mother wrote to me this week from Connecticut. “Is that wrong?”
I say no. I say whatever combination of personal conviction and political expediency led Alesi to stand up in support of gay marriage, the vote — and the law — are what matter. And anyway, that’s the thing about martyrdom: all the self-serving posturing, all the broken bones and bad decisions, fade away over time. All that’s left is the hill on which you died.
Was Jim Alesi already a dead man walking when he cast that vote? Probably. But it doesn’t matter.
Because if a broken leg and a couple years of public ridicule were the only price I had to pay to see my mother marry the woman she loves, I’d jump off the tallest ladder I could find.
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He was my State Senator, and I didn't like some of what he did. But I likely would have supported him this year, in thanks for his courage on the vote.
