Gay marriage continued to dominate the news in a way that was unimaginable a year ago. While San Francisco remained the epicenter, the ripples have spread across the land, including to a small town in New York, where the mayor himself is marrying same-sex couples.
Meanwhile, the fear of gay marriage appears to be waning among the American public.
Politicians were behind the curve in many instances. 'Kerry Flips on Gay Nups' read the headline in the New York Post when Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry threw his weight behind efforts to amend the Massachusetts Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage.
Speaking with the Boston Globe on Feb. 25, Kerry said, 'If the Massachusetts legislature crafts an appropriate amendment that provides for partnership and civil unions, then I would support it, and it would advance the goal of equal protection.' However, he does not favor a similar amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Earlier in the year, the all-Democratic Massachusetts congressional delegation sent a letter to the state legislature urging them not to amend the state constitution. Kerry was the only one who did not sign the letter.
Kerry's 'flip-flops' on marriage led the Boston-based gay In Newsweekly to endorse John Edwards in the Massachusetts primary.
'Senator Kerry is wrong. We're disappointed and upset that he would endorse this measure,' said Dave Noble, executive director of National Stonewall Democrats. 'We need him to now stand with us and fight any attempt to treat our families unequally.'
Cheryl Jacques, president of the Human Rights Campaign, was 'deeply disappointed. Make no mistake, civil unions single out a group of people for second-class treatment. That is discrimination and it doesn't belong in any constitution.'
'Marriage—not civil unions—unlocks the door to important federal protections. Civil unions do not provide Social Security survivor benefits, a system we pay into but that our survivors can't access.' Nor are they portable between states.
'The mortal danger that our community faces right now is not the battle to win the freedom to marry, it's having that battle shut down by a constitutional amendment,' said Matt Foremen, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Attorney General Bill Lockyer petitioned the California Supreme Court to intervene and stop marriages from continuing to take place in San Francisco. Few were surprised when the Court took only a few hours on Feb. 27 to decline to issue an injunction and accept the case on a fast track. The city has a week to respond to a bevy of issues raised.
Legal scholars see reason for gays to be optimistic, citing language in Perez, the 1948 case where the California Court struck down the state law prohibiting interracial marriage. There also is a 50-year history of legal rulings that separate is seldom equal, upon which the Massachusetts court based its decision on gay marriage.
'In declaring his support for a constitutional amendment that would forbid same-sex marriage, President Bush is repudiating more than 200 years of American theory and practice,' the highly respected Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in The Los Angeles Times.
'His proposal is radically inconsistent with the nation's traditions. Whatever it is, there is on thing it is not: conservative ... . Bush has proposed a reckless departure from our deepest traditions,' Sunstein concluded.
'The most important effect of the San Francisco marriage maybe a calming one: They may well serve to deflate the hysteria as to what gay marriage would mean,' said Hofstra University professor Joanna Grossman, writing in Findlaw.com .
Republican rhetoric on the issue has cooled markedly since President Bush endorsed amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage.
'We don't want to do this in haste,' said right-wing power House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. Perhaps that reflects the strongly stated opposition to the amendment from James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., the chair of the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction in this area. Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., who chairs the Rules Committee, also has expressed reservations.
The Senate appears to be even more of a challenge for the far right. Political insider Ron Gunzberger's Web site shows a majority of Senators on the record as either opposing or leaning against amending the Constitution. A two-thirds majority is required to pass an amendment.
That sentiment is reflected in a national poll conducted Feb. 11-16, while news from Massachusetts and San Francisco was at its hottest, by the Pew Research Center. Americans oppose gay marriage by two-to-one, but they are split on a constitutional amendment. And when forced to choose priorities, the issue came in next to the bottom, 21 out of 22 issues
And so the parade of gay marriages continues. On Feb. 26, it was Rosie O'Donnell and her partner Kelli Carpenter. They were married by one of the city's leading lesbians, Treasurer Susan Leal, and serenaded by the Gay Men's Chorus.
The small college town of New Paltz, New York, became the East Coast place to wed when Mayor Jason West announced that he would begin to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He performed 25 services on Feb. 27 and more than 800 people have signed on to the town's waiting list.
'We as a society have no right to discriminate in marriage any more than we have the right to discriminate when someone votes or when someone wants to hold office,' said West, a 26-year-old member of the Green Party who was elected Mayor two years ago. The state marriage law is gender neutral.
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer declined to seek an injunction to stop the marriages. He said their validity 'will be determined in due course by the courts.'
In New York City, the gay community is organizing a series of activities to put pressure on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to take similar action to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. He already has declared his opposition to amending the Constitution
In Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams has asked city lawyers to look into the legal and constitutional issues of issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The city began registering domestic partners in July 2002.
In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Feb. 25, 175 gays and lesbian sued the Broward County Court Clerk for failure to issue them a marriage license. Florida has had a law banning gay marriage since 1977.
In Iowa City, 39 couples were denied marriage licenses by the openly gay Johnson County Recorder Kim Painter. That will set up a legal challenge.
In Georgia on Feb. 26, the House of Representatives fell three votes short of the supermajority required to pass a state constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriages, with several legislators not voting. A second scheduled vote also seems likely to fail, due to the strengthening opposition of African-American legislators.
In Colorado, there were demonstrations against the amendment in the home district of Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, the lead sponsor of the measure.
And demonstrations both against the amendment and for gay marriage are springing up all across the nation. It appears that the President's support of the amendment and the happy faces from San Francisco have stoked a new and unprecedented round of activism from within the gay community.
An online forum for organizing to oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment is now up and running at the networking site Meetup, http://antiban.meetup.com/
The Democratic presidential candidates, including frontrunenrs John Kerry and John Edwards, as well as Dennis Kucinich, oppose a federal amendment. But Kerry and Edwards also oppose gay marriage. They believe the issue should be left to the states. Kerry voted against the federal Defense of Marriage Act; Edwards said he would have voted against DOMA as well had he been a senator then.
