"THE BATTLE OVER GAY MARRIAGE": Time magazine

[Nice photo on page one, Time. --ed.]

...Marriage may or may not be dead, but democracy is doing fine. The court decision has intensified efforts to pass a U.S. constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. One version of the amendment already has more than 100 cosponsors in Congress. (Two-thirds of both houses will be required to pass the amendment, which will then have to be ratified by at least three-quarters--38--of the states.) Conservative activists will make sure that voters hear a lot about gay marriage between now and November since the likely Democratic nominee for President, Senator John Kerry, comes from Massachusetts. By unhappy coincidence, the Democrats will also hold their convention in Boston this summer. ...

But it wasn't always about marriage. As recently as the early '90s, bringing marriage cases was considered foolish in gay legal circles. At least six court cases arguing that gays should have the right to marry were filed in the 1970s, and all had promptly failed. None were filed in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s only a few gay intellectuals, like Andrew Sullivan, then editor of the New Republic, a center-left magazine of policy and politics based in Washington, were arguing for marriage. In the rest of the gay community, there was division, uncertainty, even among the attorneys at Lambda Legal, the leading gay legal group. Gay radicals felt that marriage was a patriarchal, retro institution that gays should avoid altogether. Others felt that pressing for gay marriage was a strategic mistake--"too much, too soon," in the words of a gay lawyer familiar with the battles.

It was in this environment that Lambda declined to represent three couples who in 1991 sued Hawaii for the right to marry. By 1993 that case had quietly made its way to the state supreme court, and in May of that year the court startled the gay-rights movement -- and drew international attention -- when it ruled that barring gay people from getting married amounted to discrimination based on sex. (The court sent the case back to trial, but by 1998 the state constitutional amendment had passed, and no gay couples ever wed in the Aloha State.)

After the Hawaii ruling, Lambda reversed course. ...

As Wolfson was trying to promote same-sex marriage, Matt Daniels was becoming convinced that it would damage the institution of the family. Daniels, 40, runs the Alliance for Marriage, which wrote the Federal Marriage Amendment now before Congress. Daniels comes to the issues of marriage and family breakdown from a very personal place. ...

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posted by Eve at 4:32 PM | link

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