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A step back EDITORIAL, Boston Globe from the Web, March 30, 2004 Boston, MA -- LEGISLATORS WHO finally nudged a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage over its first hurdle yesterday worked long and hard at getting to yes. But we on this page still hope the next Legislature, or the public in 2006, will vote no. The bipartisan team of Senate President Robert Travaglini and minority leader Brian Lees cosponsored the amendment restricting marriage to heterosexuals but setting up civil unions for gays, which passed 105 to 92. Lees was no doubt sincere when he said that the vote to advance the amendment "did not discriminate. . . . We are not taking a step back." But granting separate but unequal civil unions is not progress for gays, who will be able to marry in seven weeks. The Supreme Judicial Court found last November that the right to civil marriage for gay and lesbian couples is protected by the Massachusetts Constitution, and supporting a change in the state's founding compact to reverse that is precisely a step back. As with the convoluted parliamentary process earlier this month, yesterday's debate was marked by vote switches and feints designed to pass the Senate leadership's relatively mild version of the amendment instead of more restrictive language. Representative James Fagan of Taunton darkly warned that should the amendment fail and the SJC decision stand, organized opponents would gather signatures to amend the constitution through the initiative process, which requires only 50 votes in the Legislature to secure a place on the ballot. And, Fagan predicted, "it will be hateful, and it will be punitive, and it will come through here like a hurricane." Perhaps. But legislators wouldn't have to be party to that. And by 2006, the earliest any amendment can reach the voters, gay and lesbian couples will have been getting married uneventfully in Massachusetts for years. Governor Romney's efforts to block these marriages are obstructionist and a deep disappointment to those who thought him broad-minded on social issues. Many legislators poured their hearts out yesterday. But we'd like to give some of the last words to Representative Marian Walsh, Democrat of West Roxbury, whose vote against the amendment was particularly courageous given her conservative district and Catholic background. Walsh admitted that the concept of gay marriage was a bit outside her comfort zone. The SJC decision "is ahead of our mainstream culture and my own sensibilities," she said, but "my level of comfort is not the appropriate monitor of the Constitutional rights of my constituents." The Constitution, she correctly observed, "has always required us to reach beyond our moral and emotional grasp." For being challenged to make that reach until hands clasp across cultural divides to meet the shared humanity of all, Massachusetts owes the state's highest court its thanks.
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