Gay marriage is for keeps in MA
I remember when gay marriage was being debated back in 2004. All day long, the tv’s in my college student lounges were showing local access to catch the debates going on over at the State House. Impassioned speeches about daughters and siblings who wanted simply to marry their beloveds, Bible-brandishing arguments, reasoned and not so reasoned appeals. It was inspiring — civics at work in an intelligent, nuanced way.
When gay marriage was finally made legal a little later that year, there was a party down at Cambridge city hall. Couples showed up in wedding dresses and tuxes, bright and early in the morning, to be the first to wed. It was one long simcha, lasting throughout the day. I was stuck in my library cubicle writing my thesis while friends went over there, but the photos just made me cry with happiness for these folks, and to this day I really regret not making it down to Central Square to celebrate.
That was not the end of it, though. Although 8500 couples have wed since then, for those of you following the debate, today was the constitutional convention to vote on whether or not to bring an ammendment banning gay marriage in Massachusetts to a referendum in 2008. Basically, this was a vote on whether gay marriage, which has already been made legal in Massachusetts, should be open to being outlawed.
Well, we won! Gay marriage is safe from challenge, at least for now, in the fine state that brought you the American Revolution, JFK, the Red Sox, universal health care (if only they would fund it), and lots of other good things promoting freedom and justice.
We remain the only state in the union in which gay marriage is legal.
Keshet did a great job of organizing the Jewish community.
See more in the Boston Globe here or, if you have to get it from the NYTimes, here . By the time you read this, there may be updates, so check the Globe for more detailed anaylsis later here. For more info on the issues, see the MassEquality website.
[And congrats to Leah featured in the photo below!]
Go Massachusetts! 49 more states to go.
Ooops! Someone pointed out that it was legalized in May, so in that case I was stuck in the library working on my finals…
very high on my list of regrets from college was that i didn’t go to Cambridge that fateful midnight to see the first (legally sanctioned) gay marriages in the history of the United States take place. Just forty or so miles away from bearing witness to a beautiful piece of history as it unfolded, instead i wrote a paper. the paper was well received but it wasn’t were my attention should have been focused.
Great piece! We also had one over at JSpot with some more political analysis, if anyone wants to check it out.
I, too, didn’t make it to Cambridge that night, though i was living next door in Somerville. I needed to get packed and ready to fly out of town on vacation the next day (to San Francisco, appropriately enough). It sounds like it was a wonderful event, though.
Yes, gay marriage is finally legal. Now we can have fun at weddings.
And all it took was the suspension of democracy. It’s interesting to see america slide slowly into dictatorship. Today the dictator is a liberal judge. Tomorrow, who knows. When unelected judges interpret laws that do not exist, the seeds for the future United States dictatorship have been planted.
Oh, formermuslim…where would we be without your right-wing talking points? But really, they fall short here. If you wanna allege that democracy was suspended, you’re going to have to back it up with real details. So let’s look at what actually happened in Massachusetts over the last 3.5 years.
The state Supreme Judicial Court–almost all members of which had been appointed by the Republican governors who had been in power since 1990–made a decision interpreting the state Constitution. Unless you oppose the existence of a judiciary branch, pelase don’t tell me that Court issuing its opinion according to the state Constitution is a “suspension of democracy.”
Then, those who opposed same-sex marriage pursued the democratic process, seeking to amend the state Constitution. First, back in 2004, they got sufficient support to advance an amendment which would have offered civil unions as a compromise, but then this pissed off both left (who wanted full marriage rights) and right (who couldn’t even stomach civil unions) and so it failed to get enough votes. Again–it lost a vote. Democratically.
Then same-sex marriage opponents gathered enough petition signatures to begin the process with another amendment (though it’s worth noting that there were many allegations of signature fraud). Because of the signatures gathered, only 25% of the (elected) state legislature would have needed to support this measure for it to go on the ballot for a popular vote in 2008. But this week, that didn’t happen. Only 25 out of 200 legislators, or 22.5%, supported the amendment. And so it failed–most democratically.
I’ll also point out that the threshold to amend the Massachusetts state constitution is lower than that for the US Constitution. Since you’re concerned with the fate of US democracy, I trust that you know that Article V of the US Constitition requires amendments to be proposed by 2/3 of either Congress or of state legislatures, and then ratification by 3/4 of the states.
One other local note you may not know is that in multiple state elections since the court ruling in 2003, no incomubent state legislator ever lost a seat because of support for same-sex marriage. On the contrary, voters elected mroe and more legislators who supported same-sex marriage. At least one incumbent who opposed same-sex marriage lost his seat to a same-sex marriage supporter!
So formermuslim, my anonymous friend, I thinkt hat what happened Thursday in Massachusetts was quite democratic. If you care to argue that, feel free, but again–you’re going to have to offer more to back up your argument than a few ominous talking points about suspension of democracy.
The fact is, the supreme court got the ball rolling. No serious human being would seriously believe the constitution of that state would require gay marriage. The fact they decided this way anyway shows a degree of contempt for the law they are supposed to interpret.
To those who support homosexual marriage: Are there, hypothetically, other potential innovations to the institution of marriage that you would be opposed to?
The fact is, the supreme court got the ball rolling.
Actually, there’d been quite a bit of discussion of the issue in the state beforehand. But to be sure, the court ruling reframed it. That’s one role of the court as a co-equal branch of government. If you’d propose to restructure the US government to change the role of the courts, I’d be glad to hear the proposal. But my guess is that you just want to harp on this talking point in this one particular case.
Oh, and there was a bill proposed to impeach the justices behind the decision. It got maybe four co-sponsors and failed miserably. In other words, it lacked popular support, so it iddin’t pass. That’s democracy.
No serious human being would seriously believe the constitution of that state would require gay marriage.
Actually, quite a few serious human beings do. If you want to critique their legal reasoning, go for it. But for that, you might have to go so far as to read the opinion, and I realize that it’s far easier to sit back and make uninformed criticisms.
The fact they decided this way anyway shows a degree of contempt for the law they are supposed to interpret.
Please. Six of the seven members of the court at the time were appointed by Republicans. Do you really think that they deicded to nominate some kind of nihilists with contempt for the law itself?
I think the issue of “contempt for law” is a subtle and critical one. What does “contempt” for “law” mean? Were the Mass. supreme court justices (as Matt notes) anarchic nihilists who reject the very concept of law? Or do they simply have contempt for laws they disagree with?
If they do then they’re stuck in a tight place: as judges their job is to ensure the application and enforcement (i.e. actualization) of the laws that are on the books–ie. the laws passed by the citizens or legislators. In this case they would have had to enforce a law that they apparently could not morally agree with. Yet it seems to me that that’s generally the job of a judge–enforce the law irrespective of your opinions of it. (it doesn’t really sound like much fun does it?!)
The only “out” from that bind is if it can be determined that the law itself is invalid. And the only way to find out if that decision was credible is to analyze it and the Mass. state constitution.
Eric– I think it’s a fair assumption that people in favor of civil marriage between people of the same sex are in favor of civil marriage between any *consenting adults* who want to be married to each other.
Six of the seven members of the court at the time were appointed by Republicans. Do you really think that they deicded to nominate some kind of nihilists with contempt for the law itself?
Nowadays, yes, I do associate Republican appointees with contempt for the law. But I don’t think that’s what was going on in Massachusetts.
For those with their panties in a bunch about the Supreme Court, the whole point of this proposed ammendment to the state constitution was that people said, “Hey! Those judges went against the people! If the people could vote on it, they would ban gay marriage!” So they put together an ammendment for Massachusetts citizens to vote on, and it went through the Democratic process, and it failed twice in the Legislature to even get enough votes to be put on the next ballot. Meaning: claims that the people would have wanted something else have been squarely rejected by Democratically elected representatives of the people. I’m not sure how many more times this needs to get said by how many more bodies of government for people to accept the fact that the majority of people in Massachusetts want gay marriage to be legal.
I think it’s a fair assumption that people in favor of civil marriage between people of the same sex are in favor of civil marriage between any *consenting adults* who want to be married to each other.
Rebecca,
Then it seems you agree that redefining the term ‘marriage’ to include two persons of the same sex is part of a broader overhaul of the traditional definition of marriage.