Panel discussions offer divergent views on impact of Goodridge

Advocates and opponents of marriage equality held panel discussions to mark the fifth anniversary of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's (SJC) landmark Goodridge ruling, but the tone of the two events could not have been more different.

On Nov. 16 a crowd of about 400 people gathered at the John F. Kennedy Library for a panel organized by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) on the future of the marriage movement. The JFK Library rolled out the welcome wagon for attendees, ushering them into a sprawling auditorium overlooking the ocean. JFK Library Foundation deputy director Tom McNaught welcomed the crowd and praised the Goodridge decision as a civil rights milestone.

The much smaller crowd of about 40 attendees at the Massachusetts Family Institute's (MFI) forum the next day received a far less hospitable reception. MFI held its forum at Suffolk University Law School, and Suffolk Law students were not pleased. To reach the Sargent Hall auditorium attendees had to walk through a gauntlet of about 60 protestors gathered in the lobby holding signs with messages including, "Keep Church and Hate Out of State," and, "Won't You Just Please Stop Hating?" The protest was relatively quiet - Professor Kate Day, faculty advisor to Suffolk's Queer Law Alliance, was the only speaker - but the mass of students holding signs made it clear that opponents of marriage equality unwelcome.

"We think it's outrageous for the law school to offer up a venue for a group that would speak on hate and bigotry. We think it violates the discrimination clause they have for us, and it's just offensive to our group," said protest organizer Matt Gavin, president of the Queer Law Alliance and a third year law student. He said alum alerted him to the MFI forum that morning, and Queer Law Alliance organized the demonstration in a matter of hours via e-mail.

While the fora were held to examine a landmark victory for LGBT civil rights, they also followed one of the worst setbacks for the marriage movement in recent years, the passage of California's Proposition 8 and of anti-gay ballot initiatives in Florida, Arizona and Arkansas on Nov. 4. Despite that loss the tone of the GLAD forum was generally positive, with panelists Mary Bonauto, the lead GLAD attorney in the Goodridge case, Laurence Tribe, the famed Harvard constitutional law scholar, and West Roxbury state Sen. Marian Walsh all offering their views on how the movement will move forward.

One audience member asked the panelists what impact they felt the post-Prop 8 protests would have on the marriage equality movement. On Nov. 15, the day before the forum, thousands of protestors in cities across the country, including an estimated 4000 at Boston City Hall, turned out against Prop 8. Bonauto said the protests have their uses, but ultimately she believes they alone will not win the day.

"Demonstrations are important," Bonauto replied. "They make people feel good, also, and involved and connected to issues. But I'll say this. I think the most important thing that anybody can do is find those people who are conflicted about this issue, who don't want to discriminate but don't like the idea of extending marriage to same-sex couples, and have a one-on-one, heart-to-heart conversation with them repeatedly. That changes minds, not demonstrations."

Tribe said despite the successes in the courts in Massachusetts, Connecticut and California the prospects for pushing for federal marriage equality at the U.S. Supreme Court are bleak for the time being. He said even if President-Elect Barack Obama appoints justices likely to support marriage equality, they are likely to replace more liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and David Ginsberg rather than the court's more conservative members like Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

"I don't think the majority is ready, and it won't be ready even with some Obama appointments ... but when [justices like Souter and Ginsberg are] replaced with people whose ideology and outlook on this issue is very similar to theirs, we're still going to have youngsters like the 13-year-old chief justice, who is also a former student of mine," said Tribe, prompting laughs from the crowd. "The young ones are here to stay for quite a while."
Bonauto said given the balance of the U.S. Supreme Court, LGBT advocates and their allies will have to turn to a process where they have historically lost: the ballot initiative. In states that have passed anti-gay marriage amendments through ballot initiatives, she said, one of the strategies advocates must use is to file new initiatives to repeal those amendments.
"Yes, we're going to be at the ballot box both on defense and on offense," said Bonauto.

Bonauto also expects much of the action in the marriage movement to continue both in the courts and in state legislatures. Within the next calendar year she predicts that New York, New Jersey and Vermont may all join Massachusetts and Connecticut in granting marriage equality to same-sex couples.

Walsh, who prior to the legislature's debates on marriage in 2004 was known as an opponent of LGBT rights legislation, said in the long run supporters of marriage equality will only succeed if they educate the public about their reasons for supporting marriage equality. She said she changed her own views on marriage after analyzing the arguments of both sides, researching the history of civil marriage in Massachusetts, and having "sidebar" conversations with advocates like Bonauto.

"This will take a lot of work, a lot of discipline, a lot of humor, and it's going to have to be at kitchen tables and legislative races, because the Supreme Court, whomever is sitting there, and legislators, whoever will hold those seats, are going to respond to whatever's happening at the kitchen tables," said Walsh. "So it's going to be a triple strategy, conversation, politics and law, because they don't function independently."

While the panelists at the GLAD forum generally painted an optimistic picture of the future of the movement, the tone at the Nov. 17 MFI forum was more dour. The panel included a keynote by Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, part of the Yes on Prop 8 coalition. Other speakers included conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, attorney Philip Moran, and David Parker, a Lexington parent who unsuccessfully sued the town for including LGBT-inclusive books in his son's elementary school.

Despite her movement's historic win on Nov. 4 - the first time a ballot initiative actually rolled back existing marriage rights for same-sex couples - Gallagher spent much of her speech outlining the threats to religious conservatives if marriage equality was to become the law of the land. She said opponents of marriage equality would be treated under the law like racists after the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision struck down bans on interracial marriage.

"Licensing is a big issue. Could you be a teacher, a social worker, an attorney, a psychiatrist, a marriage counselor, a physician who believes that the marriages between black and white are not really marriages and tries to conduct their practices along that line because they thought it was a great moral principle? Well, no actually. ... I have a problem with government defining traditional Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists as racists [because of their opposition to same-sex marriage] and beginning to treat them that way," said Gallagher, emphasizing that she strongly supports the Loving decision.

By way of example she pointed to Catholic Charities of Boston, which in 2006 discontinued its adoption work rather than allow same-sex couples to adopt.

"The Catholic Church realized that after same-sex marriage became the law two men in legal marriages or two women would approach the church and ask for babies, and if it treated those couples any differently than the union of husband and wife it would be at great legal risk," said Gallagher. She declined to mention that Catholic Charities had been facilitating adoptions by same-sex couples prior to the Goodridge decision and that the Catholic Charities board of directors voted unanimously to continue doing so post-Goodridge.

Other speakers described the LGBT rights movement in more sinister terms. Parker, apparently speaking to the handful of marriage equality supporters in the room, said, "You are intent on indoctrinating children behind the backs of parents and against their will, and are attempting to use the full force of the state to enable your cause." Moran warned that if hate crimes laws pass at the federal level, "I would predict that Maggie Gallagher and Jeff Jacoby and David Parker and Kris Mineau and Phil Moran won't be giving many of these seminars or these forums because we would be subject to some kind of legal arrest."

While Gallagher and her allies succeeded in taking away the right to marry from same-sex couples in California, she described the Yes on 8 activists as the victims in the Prop 8 conflict.

"People I know have had their property attacked, their children spit on, they've been physically attacked, shoved, hit [while] standing on the roads putting up a Yes on 8 sign. People's livelihoods are threatened. We know two people have lost their jobs just because they gave money to Yes on 8," said Gallagher.

For more coverage of the fifth anniversary of Goodridge, go here and here.