Vermont's legislature passed a bill, today, legalizing gay marriage.
Passage required a two-thirds majority (in order to override a prior veto by Governor Jim Douglas), and the Vermont House reached this threshold by one vote.
There are now four states in which gay marriage is legal: Vermont, Massachusetts (they were first, in 2004), Connecticut, and Iowa (where the state supreme court has just ruled that the constitution requires legalized gay marriage). The significance of the Vermont law is that it is the first time that legalization has occurred via a state legislature, as opposed to the judiciary.
An article in today's Times says that a coordinated effort by gay rights groups is aiming to make gay marriage legal in all six New England states by 2012.
