After a long and passionate series of debates, (which NMI live-blogged here and here), the New Mexico Senate voted last month against recognizing legal status for domestic partnerships. But meanwhile, states in the Northeast are moving in the opposite direction — toward recognizing not just domestic partnership, but full marriage rights for same-sex couples.As the Boston Globe reported Tuesday:

In a special session, the Vermont Senate yesterday voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Later this week, a similar bill is scheduled for a vote in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Next month a legislative panel in Maine will hold a hearing on a bill to allow gay couples to marry, just as lawmakers did last month in Rhode Island.

Little more than five years after the Supreme Judicial Court legalized marriage for same-sex couples in Massachusetts, gay advocates say they’re coming closer to their goal of extending gay marriage to all New England states by 2012.

“One of the advantages of New England is that we share geography and media markets, so folks in other states have seen marriage in Massachusetts for five years and can see the good,” said Lee Swislow, executive director of the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, who has called for New England to be a “marriage equality zone.” “I think the efforts build on each other. What happens in one state inspires folks in other states, and hopefully it will inspire the rest of the country.”

As NMI’s Marjorie Childress pointed out, the New Mexico State Senate’s final vote could be broken down between rural and urban legislators, with those in urban areas voting more often in favor domestic partnership. Perhaps, if Swislow is right, and more Northeastern states allow same-sex marriage, that exposure will weaken the opposition in New Mexico.