Caught this story first on Andrew Towle’s gay blog Towleroad.

It was announced (with a link to this story) that 11 state Democratic Party chairs had signed on to support the call for a marriage equality plank in the national Democratic Party platform. Among the 11 was Vermont’s Jake Perkinson.

I emailed the VDP chair with a brief word of thanks for taking the stand. He wrote back about how he “fully supports this issue,” but he never actually signed on, and Freedom to Marry (the national group) took a very preliminary conversation and ran with it without confirmation, permission, or acknowledgment.

I told him he could just take the credit for the stand (thinking, if he’s really on board, what harm?), and give Freedom to Marry a short reading of the riot act, if he thought it was worth his time.

But no. He couldn’t do that.

He’s backpedalling as fast as possible, with New York’s state Dem chairman spinning right along side.

Perkinson, meanwhile, said that while he supports gay marriage and thinks the question of a plank is one worth discussing, that he never signed off on being in the release and felt like his comments with the group were “hijacked.”

“I had had a conversation with the Freedom to Marry people and had said that I was personally supportive of their efforts, but the press release that went out was not anything that was run by me,” he said. “It certainly was a little bit overreaching to put my name on something that I hadn’t even reviewed at that point. The whole thing just seems premature…the conversation was, do you support gay marriage? And yes, obviously I do. I said, what’s the next step? They said that’s all we need for now, and we’ll get back to you….that was two weeks ago.”

Yeah, Freedom to Marry likely jumped the gun, didn’t cross its t’s or dot its i’s. The process was probably cracked.

But gosh, Jake, I had such hopes that you would take the cannoli (and an honest-to goodness stand) and leave the gun, er, the grumbling aside. I would not blame lesbian and gay Vermonters for questioning the sincerity of your commitment to national equality now.

It’ll be interesting to see how you dance around this one at tonight’s dinner honoring out gay Democratic activist and former state chairman David Curtis.