NY Times, March 28, 2004 Mayor With a Mission By ROBERT SULLIVAN
Jason West, the mayor of the little Hudson Valley village of New Paltz who married 25 gay couples last month before receiving a court injunction to stop, has been thinking about gay marriage for a long time. In fact, immediately after taking office last summer, the two things the 27-year-old asked his new village attorney to check on were, first, the state and local beaver trapping laws, since a dog had recently been caught and killed in a beaver trap on the old Bienstock property -- a huge New Paltz scandal that was soon labeled Beavergate; and second, whether a mayor could perform gay marriages. The attorney, Spencer McLaughlin, is a Republican legislator from Orange County and a former deputy executive director of the New York City Human Rights Commission under Ed Koch. That West would turn to a Republican for advice was a surprise to the people who thought the mayor, who was elected on the Green Party line, was a radical liberal activist about to turn the town into a socialist enclave. In his reply to West, McLaughlin noted that the law is unclear. ''That's because the laws were written around the late 19th century, and no one ever conceived of wanting to do this then,'' McLaughlin said recently. The attorney ended his memo to mayor saying, ''That's a very long-winded explanation of why you can't perform a same-sex marriage, but does not address the issue of whether you should or not.''
Gay marriage was also one of the issues West supported during his two ill-fated campaigns for State Assembly in 2000 and 2002 -- along with free education to the Ph.D. level and an end to corporate pollution. His campaign slogan was ''Forget the Lesser Evil -- Choose the Greater Good,'' and as he likes to say, ''I lost by a landslide.'' And back when he was in college in the late 90's at the State University of New York at New Paltz, he was known as a guy who could always be counted on to show up at the latest protest -- resisting the arrival of a new Starbucks, for example. In 1998, a local activist and gay rights organizer, Gale McGovern, asked West to help her plan a protest against a visit to a New Paltz bookstore by Gov. George Pataki, who along with state Republicans had criticized the women's studies department at the university for a conference it had organized on women's sexuality. West decided to serve as host of the event. ''He said to me recently that that was when he first started to think about organizing,'' McGovern said.
West has been a house painter since he was 15 -- he paints alone, often without even a radio -- and his workday uniform rarely changes: paint-splattered pants, T-shirt and worn tan Carhartt jacket that is functional as opposed to fashionable. He was an artist in high school, though he has the slouchless demeanor of a former jock. He is tall, and a cinch to spot on Main Street in New Paltz, a 6,000-person village -- of students and small-business owners, college professors and New York City transplants -- 80 miles north of New York City along the Wallkill River. It has been fertile ground for activism since the Vietnam era and even as far back as the Civil War, when abolitionists ran the underground railroad in the nearby hills. In town, West waves and is glad-handed by restaurant owners and shopkeepers, who have gotten over their initial fears that he might ban capitalism -- and he is now even semi-memorialized: on the day in early March when he was ordered to appear in court on charges of illegally marrying gay couples, the Gilded Otter, the local brewery, was selling Get Out of Jail Ale.
It may seem that the gay-marriage issue popped up out of nowhere in New Paltz, and that it is becoming more complicated with every news cycle. The Ulster County district attorney, Donald A. Williams, who originally charged West for marrying without licenses, most recently brought the same charges against two Unitarian ministers for marrying couples in New Paltz after West decided to stop doing so until the injunction against him is lifted. But if you stop the mayor on the street and ask him if he ever thought about gay marriage before he performed New York State's first gay weddings, he gives you a look that is part incredulous, part perturbed; asking Jason West if he has thought about gay marriage is like asking him if he has thought about renewable energy sources or the evils of global capitalism. ''This is what gets me,'' he said. ''I've always been for gay marriage. I mean, it's just the right thing to do.''
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/magazine/28MAYOR.html
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