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9/29/2003
- Force Berkshire Gas to negotiate

Another gay-marriage landmark

Apparently wracked with indecision, the Supreme Judicial Court needs to get off the dime and render a verdict in same-sex marriage in the commonwealth. A decision on a suit brought by several gay couples was expected over the summer but never materialized. While the court has a history of taking its time in difficult cases, as a constitutional equal-rights question this one is easy.

While the term "marriage" is problematical even for some traditionalists who harbor no ill-will toward gays, most people would get used to this profoundly fair-minded idea once they saw that it can strengthen the institution of marriage, not harm it. The last time American society grappled with a change in marriage laws, during the legal battles over interracial marriage in the 1950s and '60s, forecasts of moral collapse were heard across the land. But now hardly anyone gives interracial marriage a second thought.

Not waiting for East Coast guidance from the indecisive SJC, California recently enacted a same-sex domestic-partnership law that provides gay couples with nearly all the rights and benefits of marriage except the name, neatly sidestepping a law passed by initiative petition that defines "marriage" as a legal union between a man and a woman. Similar to Vermont's civil-union law, California's statute grants lesbian and gay-male couples the same rights as married couples in such areas as health insurance, property ownership and inheritance, adoptions, child support and alimony, and job leave to care for a partner who is ill. Among the responsibilities legal domestic partners will assume is taking on a partner's debts. The only difference from Vermont's law is that California gay couples cannot file state taxes jointly.

Polls show that nearly three-quarters of Californians support the law. Polls in the commonwealth show a solid majority in favor of some legal recognition of gay couples, though not for "marriage." Should the SJC invoke equal-rights provisions in the state constitution and rule that gay couples can marry, a political category-three hurricane is inevitable.

Already, Senate President Robert Travaglini has endorsed same-sex civil unions, no matter what the court says. And House Speaker Thomas Finneran is dead set against any such thing and would support an anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment.

Mr. Finneran and those who share his antediluvian views are swimming against the cultural tide, however. So many gay men and women have come out in recent years that most Americans now understand most lesbians and gay men to be decent, healthy, moral, sane, "normal" people who, when they pair off in devoted, loving couples, want and deserve the same things opposite-sex couples want: decent jobs, maybe a family, friends, a little approval, perhaps a spiritual life in or outside of a church or temple, and the right to be left alone. The rightness of this quest is so plain that -- although much political and educational struggle remains -- it is bound to succeed eventually.