BOSTON
THEY DIDN’T THINK it could happen in Massachusetts, home to virtually every gay-friendly public policy found in America. Not here, where public school students are bused to Gay/Straight Youth Pride Day rallies at the state capitol, and the “religious Right” is just the figment of an overheated imagination.
But there it was: a Defense of Marriage Act, modeled on the federal statute signed by President Clinton that defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, now a bill before the Massachusetts legislature–with a top Democrat as its primary sponsor and a broad array of religious leaders among those lined up to testify in its behalf.
This development was no happenstance, but the fruit of long efforts by the Massachusetts Family Institute to build a coalition as ecumenical as marriage itself. Over three years, director Matt Daniels had forged the relationships that made this day possible.
The witnesses slated in favor of the bill surpassed the gay community’s worst nightmare: a Catholic bishop, the pastor of the largest Asian evangelical church in New England, and Orthodox rabbi, two Eastern Orthodox church leaders, a Mormon official, and the imam of the Islamic Center of New England. Adding insult to injury, the bill had the support of the mainstream Black Ministerial Alliance, the pastors of two of the largest African American churches in Boston, and Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr. You might say a rainbow coalition had turned out to stand up for marriage.
These witnesses’ message was simple: To redefine marriage would be to tamper with a fundamental institution of society. Instead, Massachusetts should reaffirm in law its well-established understanding of marriage so as to be able to defend its institutions — at a time when the Vermont supreme court threatens to legalize same-sex “marriage,” inviting same-sex couples from Massachusetts to “marry” in Vermont, come home, and file suit. Without a law on its books addressing this issue, Massachusetts might be forced to recognize these “marriages.”
Some years back, when it looked as though Hawii might give same-sex unions the status of marriage, 29 states passed defense-of-marriage statutes. But in New England, only Maine did so. To date, bills in Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have gone nowhere. Until this year, no bill had even been introduced in Massachusetts.
It isn’t hard to see why. At a press conference on May 18, no sooner had the religious leaders stated their support for the Defense of Marriage Act than the hostile questioning began: “Some people say this is homophobic. What do you say to that?” “Do you think people should have to prove they can procreate to get a marriage license?” “Isn’t gay marriage the same as interracial marriage?” “Isn’t this bill unnecessary — and if so, isn’t it just an attack on the gay community?”
At the hearing that day before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), various gay political groups, the National Organization for Women, and their legislator friends all condemned the bill. They denounced it first as unnecessary, then as unconstitutional — although states clearly have the power to exclude, for example, polygamous and incestuous unions. The full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution has never required uniformity in marriage laws.
Then the bill’s critics demonized the other side. Why would anyone introduce legislation that is both unnecessary and unconstitutional? The answer had to be “homophobia” pure and simple. Congressman Barney Frank made a cameo appearance to condemn the “divisive” bill as aimed at “injuring vulnerable gay and lesbian youth.” (As Frank told the New Bedford Standard-Times, “‘You’re trash. You’re dirt.’ That’s all that [this bill] says.”)
A number of legislators agreed. Rep. Ruth Balser called the bill “a threat to gay people.” Rep. Jarrett Barrios said it would “invade people’s bedrooms.” Cambridge city councilor Katherine Triantafillou sternly reminded the committee that they were legislators, not clergy, and called the bill “a threat to democracy.” After several African-American ministers testified, one member of the committee, Gail Canderas, professed herself “astonished that people of color would support this bill.” Alveda King responded that the issue was not skin color, but the importance of marriage, especially as a link between the generations. This elicited a sarcastic retort from the representative: “I have no children with my current husband. What am I to do about my profound failure to procreate?” Canderas continued, “You’re asking us to marginalize 10 to 20 percent of the population by denying them the civil right to marry.”
Rep. Michael Cahill said that the Defense of Marriage Act “ostracizes, targets, and persecutes.” The result is “to devalue and dehumanize.” Rep. Elizabeth Malia, who said she’d been “brought up Catholic,” claimed that “with enough of this, you get Columbine High School.” “Why can’t we work out our differences in the legislature,” she asked, “like in housing and health care?” It seemed lost on her that she was at that very moment participating in alegislative exercise intended to enact the people’s will — instead of leaving a divisive issue to another state’s courts.
Finally came the charge of “extremism.” This bill is nothing but the creation of “the far Right,” intoned Rep. Paul Demakis, “the people who send hate mail to our offices, and who killed Matthew Shepard.” Sen. Cheryl Jacques dragged in slavery and the Holocaust. Sue Hyde, New England director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, spelled out the political implications. Her group has 1,000 members in Massachusetts, she said, and they “will regard any vote for [this bill] as an anti-gay vote.” Then the president of the Massachusetts ACLU, Jan Platner, said her piece.
The Defense of Marriage Act, Platner asserted, is an “inappropriate, ill-advised, and gratuitous” invasion of that “most sacred space where we exercise our choice of partner and family.” This seemed a slightly odd claim, since marriage is a public status, not a private act. And I was struck by the term “sacred space.” It was then that I began to catch on.
What we do with our bodies — this is the “sacred space” to which she referred. In this sacred space, not only must we be allowed to act privately, but our private choices must be publicly affirmed. Otherwise, what we do in private is merely private — and thereby “marginalized” or “stigmatized.” Our sacred choices must receive public endorsement. Liberty becomes the right to do whatever one wants with one’s body. Equality becomes the imperative to treat all sacred choices as equally valuable.
Liberty and equality are “our noble traditions” in Massachusetts, said Rep. Cahill. “We must stick to our traditions” and oppose the bill that would reaffirm marriage, he declared with no trace of irony.
With this weird inversion now unapologetically advanced by Massachusetts liberals, it’s no surprise that the Defense of Marriage Act touched a nerve, or that the press and many legislators were palpably hostile to the witnesses favoring marriage. The legal arguments offered in support of the bill by professors Hadley Arkes and Dwight Duncan and attorney Colbe Mazzarella (a mother of six) responded to every point advanced by the opposition, yet they seemed to fall on deaf ears. The Massachusetts Family Institute and the Massachusetts Catholic Conference framed their case in scrupulously positive terms, and the panel representing civic groups who favor the bill included the Knights of Columbus, with exactly 50 times as many members in the state as the Gay and Lesbian Task Force. But the strength of the bill’s supporters only redoubled the opponents’ determination to “unmask” the pro-marriage forces’ “real agenda.”
The new enlightened of Massachusetts who worship at the altar of “sexuality” are not happy about the benighted ones in their midst, the “extremists” who believe in marriage. They are especially out-raged and incredulous that many of the stubborn holdouts are “people of color.” Gary Daffin, co-chairman of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, told the Boston Globe that the African-American and Asian leaders “are being used by the right wing to split the two communities.”
Given the public savaging of the Defense of Marriage Act at the hearing, the committee is lying low and may not act unless confronted with a Vermont supreme court decision. Nevertheless, sooner or later the legislators will have to screw up their courage and choose.
David Orgon Coolidge directs the Marriage Law Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
