NY turns to celebs to push gay marriage bill

This is a pretty cool story from the New York Times:

State Senator Shirley L. Huntley, a brassy, big-haired Democrat from Queens who opposes same-sex marriage, received a call on Wednesday that left her momentarily stunned.

Maya Angelou was on the line, and she wanted to know if the senator might reconsider her position. Ms. Huntley, hardly the type to be played for a fool, at first thought her staff might be pulling a fast one.

“I said, ‘What?’ ” Ms. Huntley recalled on Thursday, adding that she was not convinced that it was Ms. Angelou until she heard her deep timbre. “I heard the voice, and I said: ‘My God. It is her.’ And that was that.”

The NYTimes also says that former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon (a Google image search tells me that she's the redhead) made calls to state Senators to try to get them to back the bill.

“We think the most effective lobbyists on marriage are actual constituents, not Hollywood stars,” Maggie Gallagher, president of the much-mocked National Organization for Marriage told the Times. “That’s the most effective thing we can do.”

Come on, even I know that Angelou and Tagliabue are anything but "Hollywood celebrities."

Tagliabue has a gay son and Nixon is a lesbian.

Gay marriage is legal and has not caused an unraveling of society in Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont.