New Hampshire’s largest paper won’t print gay couple’s legal wedding announcement [video]
”While the law sanctions gay marriage, it neither demands that churches perform them or that our First Amendment right to choose what we print be suspended.”
Joe McQuaid, Publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader. A gay couple, Greg Gould and Aurelio Tine, were set to be married in NH where marriage between same-sex couples became legal this past January. They tried to have their Portsmouth wedding announcement published in the Union Leader, which is New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, but the paper denied their request. McQuaid says the paper is opposed to gay marriage, yet claims that the paper is not anti-gay; and maintains that as a business it is their right to publish what they choose and that they have “never published wedding or engagement announcments from homosexual couples.” (WHDH)
Marriage in New Hampshire was approved by a split vote in the state legislature and was signed in to law reluctantly by Governor John Lynch. The well-funded, anti-gay National Organization for Marriage had tried earlier this year to put the matter up to a voter referendum. The state’s northeastern neighbor, Maine, had legalized marriage briefly, too; but NOM and others succeeded in having gay marriage rights repealed by a popular vote of 53-47%.
”I was really disappointed, because the Union Leader is a big voice in the state of New Hampshire, and they seemed to be so out of touch.”
Greg Gould, one of the grooms who were denied a wedding announcement by the Union Leader newspaper’s staff and publisher. (CNN)
A similar controversy erupted in New Jersey last month when the Jewish Standard apologized after it did publish a gay couple’s announcement.
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