Reporting from Washington — The New Hampshire House of Representatives has rejected a bill to repeal the state’s 2-year-old law allowing same-sex marriage, dealing a blow to activists who had hoped to make the Legislature the first in the country to repeal a gay marriage law.
Lawmakers in the House voted 211 to 116 against the bill, which would have repealed gay marriage and replaced it with a preexisting civil unions law, according to the Associated Press. It also would have made the issue a nonbinding question on the November ballot.
Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, had promised to veto the bill if it reached his desk, but opponents of gay marriage had hoped to win the two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate to override the veto. Both chambers are controlled by Republicans.
Both the civil unions law and the gay marriage law that replaced it were enacted by Democratic-controlled Legislatures and signed into law by Lynch.
