GAY MARRIAGE LAWSUIT LED TO BREAKTHROUGH: From the Associated Press

In the spring of 2001, when seven gay couples made a radical demand for the right to marry in Massachusetts, their court case barely registered on the state's political or media radar screen. When a lower court turned them down, the public gave a collective told-you-so.

"Nobody thought it was news," said Julie Goodridge, one of the seven couples who sued after being turned away at city hall when they sought marriage licenses. "Nobody thought even remotely it was going to happen."

But on Monday--three years after the court battle began, and six months after the state's highest court issued its landmark ruling granting gays the right to marry--it is going to happen. ...

Massachusetts was thrust into the center of the nationwide debate on gay marriage when the state Supreme Judicial Court issued its narrow 4-3 ruling in November said that gays have a right under the state constitution to marry.

Emboldened in part by the court's strong endorsement of marriage equality, authorities in San Francisco, upstate New York, and Portland, Ore., began issuing marriage licenses as acts of civil disobedience.

Talk arose of a federal constitutional ban on gay marriage, which President Bush ultimately endorsed.

In a matter of months, civil unions, once considered radical, had become insufficient. ...

After more than 30 hours of debate over several months, the Legislature narrowly approved a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would ban gay marriages but legalize Vermont-style civil unions. But the earliest the measure could be put before the voters is November 2006.

This drawn-out process for amending the constitution was one of many reasons gay-rights lawyers focused on Massachusetts in 2001 as the next battleground after Vermont. ...

"In most of these decisions, the court has delivered a consistent message, and that is that the definition of the family is changing and the idea of the nuclear family is no longer the rock-solid norm," said David Yas, an attorney and editor of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. "The court has seemed to go out of its way to recognize that nontraditional families deserve the same recognition as traditional families."

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