The endless war

The marriage amendment fight may have ended last summer, but the amendment's prime sponsor, the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), is still waging an anti-LGBT culture war on Beacon Hill. MFI and its grassroots offshoot, the Coalition for Marriage and Family, have their sights trained on House Bill 1722, legislation that would add trans-inclusive language to the state's hate crimes and non-discrimination laws. MFI has also quietly continued its push for reciprocal beneficiary legislation, which would grant some marriage-like benefits to unmarried people and which LGBT advocates believe is designed to lay the groundwork for another effort to ban same-sex marriage.

MFI and the Coalition sounded the alarm on H.B. 1722 on Jan. 18, sending an e-mail action alert to their supporters warning that the bill "threatens bathroom and locker room safety."

"In what State House News Service calls a 'full court press,' MassEquality has joined an effort to add 'gender identity and expression' to the state's anti-discrimination and hate crimes statutes - creating the potential for a wave of access by those claiming to be transgender into gender-specific areas like public bathrooms," read the alert, with the last half of that sentence written in bold font and underlined for emphasis.

The central theme of MFI's rhetoric against H.B. 1722 has been to warn of the dangers of men in female clothing intruding into women's bathrooms and locker rooms to do harm to women and children. For instance, in response to inquiries about how H.B. 1722 could potentially threaten "bathroom and locker room safety," MFI spokesperson Lisa Barstow provided Bay Windows with a statement from MFI President Kris Mineau expressing concern that the bill may "compromise the safety and privacy of primarily women and children."

He also stated that, "Women and children have a right to feel safe in their person when they access public rest rooms, locker rooms and bath houses at parks, recreational areas and other venues. This legislation potentially compromises that safety by, among other things, blurring the distinction of who may enter a 'women's room.'"

Mineau also claimed that adding gender identity and expression language to hate crimes would be "encroaching on our first freedoms," although his statement did not elaborate on how adding hate crimes protections for transgender people would threaten those freedoms.

LGBT advocates say the supporters of the Coalition and MFI have been contacting lawmakers and urging them to oppose the bill, which is expected to come up for a hearing before the Judiciary Committee in the next few weeks. At a Jan. 29 MassEquality organizing forum in Boston Holly Ryan, chair of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) steering committee, warned attendees that the activists behind the effort to overturn equal marriage rights were now focused on the transgender rights legislation. MTPC is the lead organization in the coalition to pass H.B. 1722.

"The VoteOnMarriage people have already put out an action alert to take this bill down, and you can imagine what they're calling us," said Ryan.

At the same meeting MassEquality campaign director Marc Solomon said that during Gov. Deval Patrick's Jan. 24 State of the State address he spoke with a few lawmakers who had heard from supporters of the Coalition urging them not to support H.B. 1722. Solomon said the lawmakers told him the people calling their offices cited concerns about bathroom safety, echoing the Coalition's action alert talking points.

"It's obviously outrageous," said Solomon.

He urged MassEquality's supporters to begin contacting lawmakers to ask them to support H.B. 1722, to counter the calls from MFI's supporters.

Bill Conley, lobbyist for the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, which is working with MassEquality to lobby on behalf of H.B. 1722, said that while MFI has mobilized its supporters to defeat the bill, he does not believe lawmakers are taking their message seriously.

"You can't help but hear about this, the crazy e-mails that legislators are getting based on what those organizations have put out as misinformation. ... The accusations they make about the bill are so outrageous and so misleading that legislators at first are inquisitive and then turned off when they realize that the information in them is really misinformation," said Conley. "When they realize that the bill is really about non-discrimination, civil rights, about hate crimes and protecting students, they're much more likely to dismiss these e-mails."

Return of the two elderly sisters
While MFI's campaign to sink H.B. 1722 has been conducted in public, the organization has led a quieter campaign to pass H.B. 1385, a bill that would allow any two adults not eligible to be married to become "reciprocal beneficiaries" and gain the right to certain marriage-related benefits like hospital visitation and the right to make decisions about the disposal of remains. One of MFI's stalwart allies, former state Rep. Phil Travis, a Rehoboth Democrat, first filed the legislation shortly after MFI and its allies launched the VoteOnMarriage.org campaign to pass the marriage amendment. During a June 2005 press conference, Mineau described the legislation as one part of a three-pronged strategy to ban same-sex marriage, along with passing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and defeating an amendment that would create civil unions.

"We believe civil unions to be discriminatory because they provide benefits only to a small segment of the population based on sexual preference, while there are many other citizens needing benefits who are in a non-sexual relationship," Mineau said during the VoteOnMarriage press conference. "An example would be two elderly sisters living together, an uncle caring for a disabled nephew, or even adults taking care of elderly parents."

Despite the defeat of the marriage amendment last June, MFI is still pressing this year for the passage of a reciprocal beneficiary bill, this time filed by Rep. Paul Donato, a Medford Democrat. Yet both Donato and Mineau said that despite the bill's origins, this time around it has nothing to do with same-sex marriage.

"The bill was never, ever promoted as some kind of an alternative for the marriage amendment. It was presented on its own merits, and those merits haven't changed," said Mineau.

Donato said that he was aware of the original intent of MFI and Travis in filing the bill, but he said his decision to re-file it was not connected to the marriage issue. He pointed to his own co-sponsorship of domestic partnership legislation in 2001 and said he has always been committed to obtaining benefits and protections for people who cannot marry.

"My position has always been the same. I have always been for providing reciprocal benefits to all individuals, same-sex, siblings or anybody else," said Donato. He said MFI sought him out to file the bill this year because of his commitment to providing reciprocal benefits to different types of couples and families.

Despite his embrace of domestic partnership legislation in the past, Donato has opposed same-sex marriage, and in June he voted in favor of MFI's failed amendment to ban same-sex marriage. In March 2007 he received a $500 contribution from MFI's sister organization, the Massachusetts Independent PAC for Working Families. (See "Pressing the Flesh.")

But Conley said he believes MFI's motivation for filing the reciprocal beneficiary legislation is not so innocent. He said passing the bill would lay the groundwork for any later campaign to overturn same-sex marriage.

"This was meant to undermine gay marriage so that if legislators then or ever again in the future want to consider taking gay marriage away, they can point to this legislation and say, 'It won't hurt too much because they have these essential protections,'" said Conley.

Conley testified against the bill at a Jan. 24 hearing before the Judiciary Committee. He said Donato and Evelyn Reilly, MFI's director of public policy, were the only people who testified in the bill's favor. Conley said neither Donato nor Reilly discussed the issue of same-sex marriage in their testimony, and Mineau confirmed this in an interview with Bay Windows, saying that MFI did not believe the issue was "relevant" in discussing reciprocal beneficiary legislation.

During his testimony Conley said he told the committee about the bill's origins and about its use in the same-sex marriage debate. He said he is hopeful the bill will not win a favorable vote from the committee.

"I'm hoping that once the committee wrestles with the origins of the bill, and as I phrased it I said this bill is tainted, I'm hopeful that they would not send it out or they would send it out with an unfavorable ought-not-to-pass," said Conley. "And frankly I don't think the House is likely to take it up under those circumstances and under our watch. It's the very sort of thing we need to keep an eye on. They're not going to let go. ... They're going to keep nibbling at the edges until they can build up enough and also work on legislators and elections. Their hope is someday to come back and take it away."