The article cited liberals against conservatives 4-to-1 and included an unchallenged quote that most states banning gay marriage "at one time or another sold blacks into slavery."
The piece came on the heels of a vote in the New York Senate Wednesday over a bill that would have granted marriages to gay couples. Eight Democrats defected from their liberal peers to kill the bill, 38-24.
CNN spent the first four paragraphs of the article commiserating with a disappointed Governor Paterson and offering reassurance to gay activists that the bill was not really dead:
Gov. David Paterson pledged to keep fighting for same-sex marriage in New York after the state Senate on Wednesday killed a bill that would have legalized the practice.
The bill had Paterson's support and had passed the state Assembly. Supporters predicted a close vote going into Wednesday's Senate debate. But eight of Paterson's fellow Democrats, including two members of the Senate leadership, joined a unanimous Republican caucus on the 38-24 vote.
In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, Paterson said, "It is always darkest before dawn."
"As disappointed as we are today, let's get up tomorrow and redouble our efforts," he said. "We are going to lay the foundation to make people feel comfortable to vote their conscience and not fear political backlash."
The crack team at CNN failed to ask Paterson if those 38 state Senators had not been voting their own conscience, or if a sitting Governor blatantly contradicting them might feel a bit like actual political backlash.
Joining Paterson was Majority leader Pedro Espada who promised "as many do-overs as is necessary to get us home." That is apparently how democracy works in the liberal mind - votes mean nothing unless they achieve the desired result. If the democratic process has failed to work in their favor, they will simply ignore it and move on.
State Senator Ruben Diaz, a Democrat, was the only opposing voice reflected in the CNN article. Diaz realized the issue would keep coming up, so he proposed a final solution: put a referendum on a statewide ballot and let the people decide.
As NewsBusters readers should remember, gay marriage bans are 31-0 on public votes, an inconvenient fact the mainstream media would usually rather ignore.
CNN used Diaz's suggestion as a launching pad to attack those 31 states:
And Sen. Eric Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat, said that most of the 31 states Diaz cited as voting against same-sex marriage "at one time or another sold blacks into slavery."
Stateline.org, a project of the Pew Center, offers a legal status of each state on the issue of gay marriage. According to the site's records, it's absurd to claim that "most" of them were slave states, especially considering that at the height of slavery before the Civil War, only 15 states had ever legalized slavery in the first place.
It's a blatant smear to throw in states like Minnesota, California, Alaska, and Hawaii into a mix of states that approved of slavery. Yet CNN allowed the quote to stand with no rebuttal, no mitigation, and no follow-up.
This is a perfect example of escalation from the left to compare gay marriage to the Civil Rights struggle endured by African-Americans and other minorities. Since that rhetoric has thus far failed to sway public sympathy, the next line of attack is to compare proponents of traditional marriage to slave holding states.
And CNN could be counted on to repeat the line with gusto.
