The state House of Representatives' decision early in the session to shelve a bill that would legalize same-sex civil unions allows the House to concentrate on economic issues in the weeks ahead. The inaction last Friday by voice vote, however, displayed an outrageous lack of moral fiber that should anger voters on both sides of the issue — and the public beyond.

House Speaker Calvin Say secretly polled all 51 members of the assembly and says he counted 26 or 27 votes in favor of the measure. The Senate had approved the bill by an 18-7 vote a week earlier. Supporters of the bill in the House chamber screamed “;roll call”; and “;cowards”; as the weak-kneed direction became apparent.

“;You can call me a coward, but we are all not cowards,”; Say said, adding that it was his role “;to make that determination and decision to do what we did.”; In other words, it was his job to cloak the positions of other representatives during an election year; he was merely a facilitator of cowardice.

The shameful, anonymous voice vote on the civil unions measure is not the way business should be conducted on any issue by elected officials, who need to be accountable for their votes. It is not how decisions — even, or especially, controversial ones — should be made in an open, representative democracy.

Say blamed the Senate for what he called “;a political strategy on their part to throw the hot plate back to us.”; The House had approved the bill last year, with 33 of the 51 members voting for it and one representative not voting.

Say said he “;just didn't want to have it linger on all the way through session.”; It would not have done so. If the House had approved the measure, it would have been sent to Gov. Linda Lingle, who has not taken a position on the issue.

Lingle would have had the option of vetoing it, signing it into law or allowing it to become law without her signature. If she were to have vetoed it and the House vote last week had been short of the 34 needed to override the veto, as Say suggested, the House would not have been compelled to waste valuable time to take up the matter again.

Alan Spector, co-chairman of Equality Hawaii, which favors civil unions, was understandably infuriated.

“;A House that passed our bill last session with one vote shy of the supermajority just killed it,”; he told the Star-Bulletin's B.J. Reyes, “;and they don't even have the integrity and courage to let their vote go on record.”;

As for the concern about bringing up a hot-button social issue while economic concerns are of utmost importance, Say has introduced a bill to legalize gambling “;for discussion purposes.”; He acknowledges that creating a gambling commission and putting out bids for a casino in Waikiki, as he proposes, would take “;one or two years to get it off the ground.”;

That would be longer than the current recession is likely to last. Obviously, whether to take time away from dealing realistically with the state's budget crisis to debate a divisive, unrelated issue depends on how House leaders feel about the issue.