Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler is now the first statewide elected official to support same-sex marriage. Gansler made his support known yesterday before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee on the proposed same-sex marriage bill.

Gansler’s office — under his predecessor, J. Joseph Curran, Jr. — successfully defended Maryland against a suit brought by gay couples who wanted to overturn the 34-year-old state law defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman. But Gansler has now told the Washington Post he considers the same-sex marriage bill to be a “basic matter of fairness.” “This bill is fundamentally about equality,” he told the paper. “It would be wrong for me to have this job knowing there’s something so wrong in our society and just ignore it.”

The senate committee heard arguments from both sides of the issue. Proponents of the measure made it a priority, according to the Baltimore Sun, after the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that the ban on same-sex marriages does not violate the state’s constitution. The bill’s opponents say that if it passed, it would tear the fabric of society; they also suggested that voters should decide on the matter.