According to Bloomberg.com, a replacement for Hillary Clinton has been selected by New York Governor David Paterson:

Paterson has picked Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Times reported on its Web site. An aide to Gillibrand confirmed she’d accepted the appointment, the newspaper said. The governor has scheduled his announcement for noon in Albany.

At first glance, I wondered if Gillibrand might be gay. I don’t know much about her: since she’s not a household name and has only served in the house for two years’¦ but a quick Google search indicated that my gaydar was off. She’s not family, but I did find out her position on same-sex marriage in a recent interview with the Hudson Valley’s InsideOut:

What I’d like to do legislatively, on the federal level’”and I think we’ll be able to do this with the new president’”is actually make civil unions legal in all 50 states, make it the law of the land. Because what you want to fundamentally do is protect the rights and privileges of committed couples, so that they can have Medicare benefits, visit in the hospitals, have adoption rights. All [the] things that we give to married couples, committed gay couples should be eligible for. And then the question of whether you call it a marriage or not, what you label it, that can be left to the states to decide.

[It’s] so culturally oriented. My mom’s generation, they want their gay friends to have every right and privilege that they should be eligible for as a married couple, but they feel uncomfortable calling it marriage. To them, a marriage is a religious word that they learned from the Catholic Church: It’s a covenant between a man, a woman, and God. So they feel uncomfortable with the word. But they don’t feel uncomfortable with the rights and privileges.

I think the way you win this issue is you focus on getting the rights and privileges protected throughout the entire country, and then you do the state-by-state advocacy for having the title.

Hmm’¦ “All the things that we give to married couples, committed gay couples should be eligible for.” Eligible for benefits that will impact the bank accounts of gays and lesbian couples – I like her immediately! Any New Yorkers want to weigh in?

Photo credit: wikimedia.org.