Time Out

Passionate speeches evoke tears

While gay couples marry in San Francisco, giving California something to think about, lawmakers in Boston have given up for a month. They can't get an amendment passed that bans gay marriage. If they don't find a way to pass it in March, I predict they never will: once the first couples marry, and the sky doesn't fall, passing an amendment that would undo those marriages will be seen as exponentially more cruel than the same amendment today. The speeches cited in the article above are the sort of argument that needs to be presented to the American people over and over, and not just in the Massachusetts legislature or the Berkshire Eagle . This supposedly black-and-white issue of fundamental morals is actually about real people and their everyday lives. We work alongside you, pay taxes alongside you, live and die with you. All the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has suggested is that we deserve the same protections as you. OK, I suppose this is an issue of fundemental morals.

You may ask why it matters whether those protections come as marriage or in the guise of civil unions. Every state has marriages; at the very least, couples who marry in Massachusetts can expect that some more liberal states will immediately recognize those marriages, and corporations that do business in Massachusetts would immediately extend benefits to married same-sex couples. In the longer term, allowing gay marriages in one state is a more useful social experiment than offering civil unions. We've already seen that civil unions didn't destroy Vermont; now it's time to find out if a state can survive gay marriage. If Massachusetts can survive, the slippery slope by which marriage rights may spread to the rest of the nation may not seem quite so daunting to those who fear it.

Of course, if the current Supreme Court heard a case in which Ohio refused to recognize a marriage from Massachusetts, there's a chance the same five justices who started this ballgame with Lawrence v. Texas could end it by forcing all 50 states to acknowledge gay marriages performed in any state. While that may not be the ideal way to make progress on civil rights, it would certainly be the fastest.