Massachusetts court says only gay marriage- not civil unions- is acceptable.

Great Debates
1

Yahoo News

The court was ruling in response to a state request for clarification of the court’s november decision which found “no rational basis” to withhold marital rights from same-sex couples.

This is big, is it not? Massachusetts is going to have full-blown gay marriage, at least for the few years it takes to pass an amendment.

How is this going to affect the national election. This is Kerry’s home state. I sbush now going to play the homophobe banjo harder than ever? I say yes. Some sort of bigoted, anti-gay marriage amendment will be part of the GOP platform. Mark my words.

Good for the court, though. I wonder how long it will take the earth to stop spinning once they start issuing those marriage licenses.

2

Sounds good.

Please could someone point me at a site that explains the difference between marriage and civil union in American law.

3

I saw this in the news this morning. This is bad. It goes to the argument I had with Polycarp in an earlier thread about whether or not the court was being “activist” or not. This appears to leave no out for the legislature other than to enact gay marriage. It’s hard for me to comprehend that the need for gays to be married (civil unions with all the legal status of marriage is not enough) within the next few months is so overwhelming that MA can’t wait a bit longer to allow a constitutional amendment to pass or not pass per the will of the people.

And yes, this will be bad politically for the Dems. I’ve posted in several other threads how this plays right into the Pubs hands, so I won’t repeat myself here. You saw a hint of it in the SotUA last month. Judicial activism tied into gay marriage.

4

Aside from the 2004 election ramifications, what affect do people see this having on gay marriage as a whole? It seems to me that if a significant number of couples actually do get married, then it will be that much harder for an amendment to actually get passed (in MA).

5

(Sorry if that seems like a hijack, Diogenes: the OP seemed pretty open ended and it seemed vaguely on-topic in regard to the “This is big, is it not?” question…)

6

While I tink I agree with teh court in principle, and definitely support gay marriage, I’m winching at the inevitable backlash. This coud set the gay right movemnt back years.

7

Great. Just fuckin’ great. The Forces of Darkness will be falling all over themselves in thier dead rush to “defend the sanctity of marriage” from the homosexual agenda. Shit.

That said, though, they have a point. If marriage is an institution with advantages for the participants, and if homosexuals are to be excluded, then a rational basis for that exclusion must be presented, and must be valid. Of course they’re right, I just wish their goddam timing was better…
Digress: whats Barney Frank’s take on this? I admire and respect him so much, I almost wish he’d move to Minnesota so I could vote for him. Pansy he may be, but he’s got a set of stainless steel cojones.

8

Likely, such an amendment will never pass. AFAICT the legislature is not in any hurry to try to continue discrimination, knowing that they cannot satisfy both the public and the judiciary. According to the majority, the state did not present a compelling case to continue the discrimination, leaving them only the route of finding one (not likely) or amending the constitution (not likely).

A coworker of mine already indicated he is “offended as a married person.” I asked him if he was filing for divorce since his marriage is now meaningless. He felt seperate but equal is fine for him. I mentioned the problem all started after white property owners no longer held a monopoly on voting. He wasn’t impressed, though I’m quite sure he’ll not be able to muster up why.

9

From this site:

MA Assembly: 136 Democrats/23 Republicans/1 Independent
MA Senate: 34 Democrats/6 Republicans

Perhaps the legislature is out of sync with the people on this one. I haven’t seen any MA polls on the issue of gay marriage, and perhaps the folks in that state do support it. To the extent that they don’t, and if the legislature does not at least put an amendment up for a vote, there might be a few more Pubs in the legislature next time around.

10

The polls I saw after the first decision indicated that a majority of the people of Massachusetts supported the court’s decision.

My personal suspicion is that this is why the legislature is sitting on its hands and not doing anything, either to enact the court’s decision before the deadline or to prevent it. The will of the people is known; however, the will of the anti-gay-marriage sorts is also known, and anyone who introduces a bill to officially make gay marriage happen would be in their sights in a big way.

My impression is that plenty of folks around here think that gay marriage is just fine or at least not something to get their knickers in a twist over; however, most of them aren’t voting on the basis of that issue. A candidate that got the anti votes mobilised in force might have problems, even if the district was more pro than anti; better and safer to just avoid the issue.

11

Remember that Massachussets was the only state to vote against Nixon (And yes, that means California too). Doesn’t speak well for their mainstream-ness, eh?

12

I second Bippy’s question - what’s the difference?

Regards,
Shodan

13

Shodan, Bippy, the Senate wanted to know if it mattered. The court felt that, in order to avoid “seperate but equal” issues, it did matter. The law for marriage should be the same for all, barring legitimate state interests which, in the case of homosexual discrimination, it (the state) could not support. If the state could not support discrimination, I don’t see that it could support semantics. MHO.

14

Marriage is a recognized tradition, with a long history. The concept of marriage is deeply enshrined and respected in the US.

“Civil Union” sounds Orwellian: make up a phrase to describe a concept that already has an accepted name in order to make it more palatable to an (admittedly large) segment of the populace.

15

Yep, this is big all right.

I’m probably in a self-selecting crowd, but the majority of the people I know aren’t bent out of shape by the MASC’s ruling today. They’re pretty surprised, no question, but not terribly upset. So my very unscientific survey seems to agree with the post above, that, by and large, the people of MA don’t have a big problem with the legalization of gay marriage. Archbishop O’Malley may say otherwise, but most of the Catholics in this state are pretty liberal. And besides the devout Catholics, the state is pretty secular in general, compared to other states.

So John Kerry is in a real bind, no question. We here in the People’s Republic most certainly do NOT vote like folks in the Bible Belt. How can Kerry stay true to his constituents and appeal to the South and the Heartland? Probably he can’t. At best, he can claim his personal values to not support gay marriage, while his constitutional and representational duties oblige him to honor the tolerant nature of the Mass. majority (bad pun, I know). Yeah, Bush is gonna flail him with this one.

Given the above, and for a few other reasons, I have a hard time believing the “activist jurist” hypothesis. If the the MASC really is hoping to institutionalize gay marriage, they seem to have chosen a risky way to go about it. Our state has no option now: Amend the constitution somehow, or gay marriage is here to stay. Since other states will be obliged to honor MA marriage licences, they must either accept it, or the US constitution must be amended. This is a big freakin’ deal. The only alternatives I see are an amendment to ban gay marriage, or an amendment making marriage licenses from one state invalid in another; so like a drivers licence, if you want to be recognized as “married”, and be a resident of another state, you’ve got to get a new license. The latter might have a huge negative impact on corporations, which will have to have separate benefits policies depending on the state; this would probably make it more difficult for certain sectors to keep empolyees in one state if said employees can just move to another state that better fits their values. It will divide the country in a way it’s never been divided before.

It’s a crisis, all around, and we’re being forced into it by a strict deadline that essentially cannot be met. If the MASC has an agenda beyond strict interpretation of the MA constitution, damned if I can guess what it might be. Be they gay-friendly or hostile, the consequences of their actions could go either way, and have very long-term consequences. It’s a hell of a gamble, if they’ve a vested interest in any particular outcome beyond clarification of the law.

16

It does speak well for its being able to do the right thing, though - you do know what Nixon turned out to be, don’t you? Well, forty-nine states were wrong. In an earlier age, the Boston-centered abolitionist movement was certainly “non-mainstream” at the time, but obviously correct in hindsight. Perhaps you ought to consider the arguments being made in Massachusetts before dismissing them?

At any rate, this by E. J. Dionne may help clarify for you what Massachusetts really is. As for what your glib remark has to do with fighting ignorance, let’s leave that to you.

John Mace, if you think partisanship has anything at all to do with it, you need a better understanding of Mass. politics too. The most prominent division here isn’t Rep/Dem but insider/outsider. Party names, except for a few stiff ideologues that nobody votes for anyway, are flags of convenience. What you see here is an autocratically-run legislature, with Speaker Finneran’s loyal minions getting the goodies while those who oppose him might as well not show up. That includes reformist Dems as well as pretty much all self-named Reps. Outsiders can get elected (note the string of GOP governors sent to Beacon Hill by voters sick of the insiders), but can’t get anything done unless they learn to play the inside game itself.

If Finneran can’t see a simple statutory way to satisfy both the court and a predominantly working-class Catholic electorate without losing some of his own grip, then putting an amendment on the ballot to wash his hands of it politically may be his only way out, armtwisting by the church bureaucrats be damned. But, being the fair-minded people we are, and with a substantial resistance lately to following the directives of the Archdiocese, it is not nearly a sure thing to pass anyway.

elucidator, Barney Frank takes the position you’d expect he would, but has tried hard to stay in the background, knowing that he’d galvanize opposition if he did. He may, probably does, also know that legalization is more likely to happen if it simply looks like the right thing to do, not as the result of special-interest-group pressuring. Damn right the timing isn’t great for Kerry, but when is timing ever perfect?

17

Here’s the complete text of what was entered into the record this morning as the courts advice:

http://www.boston.com/news/specials/gay_marriage/sjc_020404/

I don’t think this is a very good advisory opinion. The original ruling was based on the principle that gays were being denied the tangible legal benefits of civil marriage, and that the justification for that denial was insufficient. The proposed civil union package would extend all of those benefits to gays who wanted to be joined, the statute proposed was very thorough in making civil union status equivalent to marital status in all statutes and common law definitions.

The only distinction between civil unions and marriage under the proposed system would have been the designation. What’s in a name? Nothing, in the eyes of the law. They could change every instance of the word “marriage” to the phrase “banana dance” or “kumquat legion”, and nothing would change functionally. Splitting the term into two functionally identical terms is no different than calling some restaurant servers “waiters” and others “waitresses”. As long as they do the same job and are treated differently by the employer, they’re really the same thing. We call them different terms out of tradition, and that’s it.

This doesn’t warrant comparisions to “separate but equal”, as that phrase was historically used. Separation there was held to be inherently unequal because there was actual physical segregation going on that had a tangible negative effect. Civil unions and civil marriage would not be separate in any tanglible way. Those seeking civil union would not have to go to a different licensing bureau, or use a separate parallel court system to settle disputes, or any such thing. The full extent of their separation would be that one would appear at Section X.X of the state code, the other at Section Y.Y.

If what gays wanted was equal rights under the law, they would have been happy with civil unions. So clearly that isn’t what they want. I suspect that what they want is to eradicate any distinction in human language between their sexual identity and lifestyle and that of the mainstream population, and by removing the linguistic distinction thus remove all distinction in thought or meaning. That would fit with some of the prevailing notions about language in intellectual circles these days, that linguistics is given credit for creating various social constructs that can be de-constructed in this way. Just a guess, of course, but something like that theory would have to be lying underneath all this for the choice of word to have such relevance.

18

If they’re so equivalent, RexDart, then why should you care, either? The marriage law could not discriminate. Providing a seperate but equal kind of civil union would not have addressed the original problem, which was that the law was exclusionary without compelling state interest. Absent a compelling state interest, the esclusionary practice needed to be addressed. Do you get your own consitution that is “equivalent” in everything but name?

Dissenting justices already pointed out that nothing stopped gays from getting married. After all, nothing forbids a man from marrying a woman, right? Equality is where you find it, I guess.

19

Here’s my question: some pundits I’ve read state that this decision makes it more likely that a Constitutional amendment barring all same-sex marriages will pass, because they believe that it’s inevitable that the national DOMA will be challenged in the Supreme Court, and that it’ll be struck down for violating the Full Faith and Credit Clause, thus leaving us with the nightmare scenario conservatives paint of either “shoving gay marriage down the throat of every state,” or the amendment.

What do you think?

As for the political consequences, well, it’ll be uncomfortable, certainly, but when was election-time politicking ever not? We’ll just have to see how this plays out in the next nine months… (Though asking both candidates “what do you think of homosexuals on a personal level? Do you believe that they will go to Hell?” would be kinda interesting, though I suspect ultimately pointless.)

20

This is going to be a very difficult issue at the national level. I certainly hope the SCotUS will leave it to the states.

If MA does address the issue on a constitutional level, then some state (like Utah) most certainly will. It’s my understanding that it’s already been resolved that states which do not allow gay marriage do not have to recoganize it from another state. But I hope one of our resident lawyers can clarify that. And if this hasn’t been dealt with by the SCotUS, then I’m sure it’ll get booted up there in due time.