The Associated Press profiles the mayor of Providence, David Cicilline:
As one of the few openly gay mayors of a major American city, David Cicilline is a powerful lobbyist for same-sex marriages.
But he’s not planning to open his City Hall office anytime soon to gay and lesbian couples hoping to be married, as a few of his sympathetic counterparts across the country have done in recent weeks.
What the news article gets around but doesn’t actually spell out is that essentially the civil disobedience of mayors and city officials in marrying gay couples has generally arisen in cases of a disconnect between a municipality with a large gay population and a state government too big to move from the local level. Massachusetts on the other hand has moved so far toward gay marriage in no small part because it’s a political city-state: not only is the major city also the capital, but most of the population lives within the economic reach and commuting distance from Boston. This has meant a local scale to the deliberations at the State House and a bias toward urban and suburban values in the political debate. In sum, we have no Upstate New York or Central Valley as a counterbalance to gay-friendly Boston.
For similar reasons, I think people should keep an eye on Rhode Island. True, it’s not quite as liberal as its northern neighbor, but otherwise shares much in its political disposition: a Democratic monopoly among the electorate combined with moderate Republican governors; a gay-friendly major city that serves as both economic center and state capital; and a New England live-and-let-live ethos. Not to mention an individualistic streak that comes from being the smallest and perhaps most neglected state.
Mind you, I lived there for four years and never could make heads from tails of local politics.
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