ON THREE OCCASIONS in recent years, the Massachusetts Senate has approved domestic-partnership benefits for gay and lesbian couples, only to see the legislation die in Speaker Tom Finneran’s House. So it is certainly welcome news that one of Finneran’s loyal lieutenants, House Ways and Means chair John Rogers, may be ready to strike a far-reaching compromise.

For years Rogers was the principal sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which would prohibit the state from recognizing same-sex marriages. Now, according to news reports, Rogers is prepared to accept Vermont-style civil unions. His support, though, would come with a price: a law that would prohibit gay marriage in Massachusetts. In effect, Rogers is offering civil unions in return for placing a DOMA law on the books.

Rogers, Finneran, and a third social conservative, Representative Eugene O’Flaherty, deserve credit for the distance they have traveled. Pro-gay-rights House members who met with Rogers last year — Liz Malia (who is openly lesbian), Alice Wolf, and Marie St. Fleur — deserve thanks from the gay and lesbian community for maintaining a dialogue in order to see how far Finneran and his allies were willing to go.

But this is no time for compromise.

Not with a Boston Globe/WBZ-TV poll last spring showing that Massachusetts residents favor same-sex marriage by a margin of 50 percent to 44 percent.

Not with a new poll by Decision Research, commissioned by the Freedom To Marry Coalition of Massachusetts, showing that support now stands at 59 percent to 35 percent — and that "if civil marriage between gay or lesbian couples were legal, 77 percent of Massachusetts voters would find it acceptable, and only 22 percent would not."

Not with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court poised to rule in the Goodridge case on whether to recognize the right of same-sex couples to marry.

"Separate but equal doesn’t work," says Malia. The problem with civil unions, she adds, is that they are "a legal hybrid that’s neither fish nor fowl."

In fact, Rogers has come to this moment not because his position is strong, but because it is weak, and getting weaker by the day. Apparently he and Finneran have concluded that civil unions — a vast improvement over the domestic-partnership bills they worked to defeat just a short time ago — are now the minimum they can publicly advocate in order to achieve their larger goal of keeping same-sex marriage illegal.

The trouble for them is that the ground is rapidly shifting in favor of same-sex marriage. At such a time, it would be folly for marriage advocates to accept a compromise that falls short of ensuring their basic civil rights.

"The polls are showing that the public is getting it. The public is getting that we are a better America when we support all our families — when we don’t discriminate," says State Senator Cheryl Jacques, an out lesbian and mother of two who will soon become executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest civil-rights organization for lesbians and gay men. "At the end of the day, I hope that everyone’s position is the same as mine: that we will never trade our civil rights for token offers of support."

To be sure, some gay and lesbian advocates may believe it’s better to compromise than to risk harming the lives of the people they represent. Last week, the Catholic Church retreated from an offer that Bishop Daniel Reilly had seemed to make at a State House hearing, when he all but endorsed some type of domestic-partnership benefits for same-sex couples. To underscore just how untrustworthy the Church continues to be, its weekly newspaper, the Pilot, blamed it all on the media.

The Church, battered and bruised though it may be from its self-inflicted wounds, remains a significant force in Massachusetts. And cutting a deal with a Catholic politician such as Tom Finneran rather than risking it all in the public arena must surely be a tempting prospect.

Then, too, the House and the Senate are scheduled to meet in joint session on November 12 to consider a constitutional amendment that would outlaw same-sex marriages. If such an amendment were to pass in two separate legislative sessions, it would go on the statewide ballot. And if the hatemongers succeeded in scaring voters into supporting such an amendment, it would trump even a favorable decision in the Goodridge case.

Ultimately, though, what’s at issue is a matter of fundamental rights. Compromising with the likes of Rogers, Finneran, and O’Flaherty essentially validates an invalid position: that civil rights guaranteed to all of us should be subject to the whims of elected officials. After all, what they grant, they can also take away.

"It’s very interesting to hear these legislators say that we need to compromise," says Joshua Friedes, advocacy director of the Freedom To Marry Coalition. "Who are we compromising with? Legislators who feel uncomfortable with civil rights for gay and lesbian people. On issues of fundamental civil rights, we shouldn’t compromise. We learned that lesson long ago."

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