Mass. Marriages and Mass Movements
Sue Hyde is director of the Creating Change Conference at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a member of the board of directors for MassEquality.
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Massachusetts zoomed ahead of every other state in the country when, on May 17, 2004, it began to issue licenses to marry to same-sex couples. The task that faces Massachusetts marriage equality activists now is to protect and preserve the right to marry while an invigorated and enraged right-wing movement tries to wrestle it away from us. Meanwhile, the issue rises and falls -- mostly falls -- in other states, but in a few states, advocates hold out hope to follow Massachusetts into the future.
When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts issued its landmark ruling of November 18, 2003 in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, activists and organizers in our state were elated and giddy that thirty years of cultivation of the political and legal ground had borne its fruit. I vividly recall a conversation with a wise colleague in the peace and justice movement. "So, our state has just leapfrogged 20 years ahead of the rest of the country," she said, with a note of worry in her voice. "What will possibly close that gap quickly enough to preserve our gain in Massachusetts?" How prescient of her to speak a truth: in social justice organizing, affirmations of a profound social change help to protect, defend, and buttress that change. Her call for consensus on the question of same-sex marriage didn't deflate my elation or sober me to the harsh realities that would confront us. But she was, and is, exactly right. Three years on, one kind of consensus on same-sex marriage has been articulated, but not in our favor. In Massachusetts and in the US, the endorsement of same-sex marriage by a second state is what is most urgently needed.
Over 8500 marriage licenses to same-sex couples have been issued in Massachusetts and the sky has not fallen and yet, no other state has followed suit. But even more dismaying, states have echoed the right-wing movement's anti-LGBT rhetoric by enacting a whopping 25 statutes or constitutional amendments since 2004 that bar recognition of same-sex marriages and, in some cases, bar other forms of partner recognition, like domestic partnerships and civil unions. A total of 41 states have enacted some kind of law that bans same-sex marriages. (See map on p. 24) Only one state, Arizona in November 2006, has successfully fended off an amendment to ban marriage for same-sex couples and other non-marital forms of partner recognition. Massachusetts stands alone as an enticing target for the right-wing anti-gay industry, Presidential candidates, and every zealot from the American Taliban who wants to nail us on a morals charge.
The Massachusetts Legislature is poised to vote for a second and final time on whether to introduce an anti-marriage constitutional amendment as a referendum question on the Massachusetts ballot. Senate President Robert Travaglini is required by law to convene the legislators in a "constitutional convention" no later than May 9, 2007, but there is no guarantee that an actual vote will be taken that day. Travaglini has until January 6, 2009 to call the vote on the measure, which, if approved by at least 50 out of 200 legislators, would then appear on statewide ballots in the next general election. Travaglini has not been an ally of marriage equality advocates. On January 2, 2007, he called a vote on the amendment within three minutes of gaveling the constitutional convention into session, short-circuiting needed time for debating the amendment and for lobbying legislators to secure their "no" votes. We lost the vote, 62 yeas to 134 nos.
Marriage equality advocates in Massachusetts now must wage an uphill struggle to win the votes of up to 25 legislators, none of whom has voted with us to oppose the anti-marriage amendment. This final group of legislators includes many holdouts who have repeatedly voted for the amendment. Fortunately, the campaign leader, the marriage advocacy group MassEquality, claims an astonishing electoral record of defending and re-electing each and every pro-equality incumbent legislator, defeating a handful of anti-equality legislators, and building the number of pro-equality legislators from a few dozen in 2004 to over 130 in 2007. Convincing the last remaining persuadable legislators to pull the "no" lever on the anti-marriage amendment is the organization's most difficult challenge to date. MassEquality will dispatch organizers to the districts of these legislators to ask voters to contact their elected representatives and senators via signed postcards, phone calls, letters, and face-to-face meetings. MassEquality will also ask key community leaders from the labor movement, faith groups, women's organizations, civil rights organizations, health groups, and the business community to show legislators that trusted leaders in their communities oppose the amendment. MassEquality staff will be joined at the hustings by organizers from two national groups: the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign. On May 17, 2007, MassEquality will host a major cultural event to celebrate the third anniversary of the issuance of the first marriage licenses to same-sex couples and rock the house for marriage equality.
MassEquality's work to defeat the anti-marriage amendment steams ahead with a goal of winning in the Massachusetts legislature. A win will deny the anti-gay vanguard what they most want: a referendum on gay marriage in the only state that has it. A referendum will cost marriage equality supporters many millions of dollars to defeat, drain the LGBT community and our allies of energy, time, and resources, and throw our state into the maw of a campaign that is certain to be divisive, ugly, and just plain mean. It is imperative that Massachusetts and its LGBT families be spared this unnecessary and painful experience. In other states where such campaigns have been waged, harassment and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people and communities spikes, exacting a terrible toll on the social fabric that holds us all together. But there is yet another reason that we must win in Massachusetts: If we do not defeat the anti-marriage amendment here, what other state legislative bodies will take the political risks of standing in support of gay marriage?
In other states, the edifice of heterosexual supremacy enshrined in the phrase "marriage is for one man and one woman only" is under reconstruction. This year, legislation to reform marriage laws so that same-sex couples can legally wed has been introduced in California, New York, Vermont, Washington, and Illinois. In Wyoming, a legislative committee on February 22, 2007 killed a proposal to ban recognition of gay marriages performed in other states. Legislative reform of marriage laws, fueled by the powerful social change movement for full respect of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, remains on the table in a handful of states, even while most states have acted preemptively against it.
At the federal level, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prevents Massachusetts same-sex marriages from being recognized in over a thousand different federal laws, policies, and practices. From tax laws to immigration rules to Social Security Administration policies, our federal government turns ears unhearing and eyes unseeing towards our marriages. But until a solid foundation of state marriage equality law and policy is built, there is little hope that DOMA will be repealed or successfully challenged in the courts. Casting one's eye over the terrain of marriage politics, one wonders what exactly is at stake here. Why would a nation suddenly go berserk when a group of citizens seeks the right of qualified couples to legally marry? What is more unexciting and boring and utterly traditional than marrying the person one loves? Is there any social institution that speaks more clearly of banal stability than marriage?
The answer to these questions is both simple and profound: The right-wing anti-gay industry does not simply object to gay marriage; it objects to and wants to erase gay people, by which I mean any person whose sexual orientation or gender expression does not neatly and exactly conform to male and heterosexual supremacy. The threat that the Christian right identifies is a real and present danger that social approval of non-conforming sexual orientation and gender expression poses to their way of living, their way of warring, and their notion of what it means to be properly godly. Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and the Traditional Values Coalition cannot brook any cultural acceptance of homosexuality and its iterations because to do so is to erode men's control over themselves, their wives, their children, their congregations, and their members.
What is sometimes lost in the back-and-forth about same-sex marriage is that two men or two women who make lives together, with full approval of the rest of society as expressed in legal marriage, dispute the anti-gay industry's vision of correct living: heterosexuals raising a generation of heterosexuals who subscribe to tightly scripted gender roles. In the wake of gay marriages in Massachusetts, right-wing activists froth over the "exposure" of elementary school children to families headed by two women or two men because they know that the more familiar their kids become with the reality of LGBT families, the more normal LGBT people become and the less defensible is their ideology of inevitable male supremacy.
Want to tip over patriarchy? If you live in Massachusetts, visit the MassEquality web site for ways to get active in the campaign to defeat the anti-marriage amendment. If you live in other states, do a web search for same-sex marriage in your state. You can educate yourself about the current political situation in your state and visit the web sites of your state's LGBT political organization so you can join the struggle in your own community, where it matters most.
