PROFILE OF EVAN WOLFSON: Deb Price

...''Sure it will be scary and painful at times, and surprising and moving at times -- but that's what civil rights movements look like when you are in the middle of them,'' he says calmly of my list of horrors about the backlash over gay marriage.

Right there, he'd be quick to correct me. Not ''gay marriage,'' he'd say, but ''marriage.'' This is a civil rights movement to expand the freedom to marry.

Freedom to marry. Put a .org after that and you'll find Wolfson's cyber-based organization, where he does everything from enlisting celebrity allies like African-American civil rights leader Coretta Scott King to providing a state-by-state calendar of events to help folks know how to go about rolling up their sleeves and pitching in.

But freedom to marry -- a phrase I found hokey before I understood that Wolfson had, characteristically, chosen it carefully -- harkens back to a famous Supreme Court ruling: ''The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,'' the court unanimously declared in 1967, striking down the remaining 16 state bans on interracial marriage -- over the objections of 70 percent of Americans.

As a boy, Wolfson sensed that his feeling of being different somehow meant he'd never marry. Yet it wasn't until 1983 at Harvard Law School that he crafted the first architectural sketch of what is being built before our eyes today. His paper was titled, ''Same-Sex Marriage and Morality: The Human Rights Vision of the Constitution.''

After Harvard, he joined the fledgling gay rights legal team, prodding skittish lawyers to reach for full marriage. He was taken far more seriously after his work as co-counsel in Hawaii led to the first ruling by a trial court in 1996 dismissing an array of arguments against marrying gay couples. Even though voters stopped the clock, Hawaii made the once impossible dream no longer seem impossible. A Vermont court in 1999 ruled similarly against marriage discrimination, leading to ''civil unions,'' or marriage lite. And on this May 17, Massachusetts became the first state to welcome gay couples into lawful matrimony.

With a hand in it all, Wolfson's heard every question: Why now? What about kids? Won't this hurt society? Isn't this a religious issue? How can you compare this to the African-American struggle?

His new book, ''Why Marriage Matters,'' answers such questions and gives readers a glimpse into his crystal ball.

The freedom to marry ''will come to seem natural and inevitable, and we'll come to that place sooner than people think,'' he says.

And when we do, gay couples won't be the only ones singing a happy tune.

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posted by Eve at 11:40 PM | link

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