OP-ED; Why gays seek to bar the door to Rogers

Thomas M. Keane, Jr.
792 words
25 January 2002
Boston Herald
All Editions
029
English
(Copyright 2002)

Gay marriage is the relationship that once dared not speak its name. But that's quickly changing and the Massachusetts Bar Association, unaware and unthinking, is now embroiled deep in controversy.

As a result, tonight's annual dinner, a feel-good event for lawyers from around the state, has the makings of a disaster. Virtually all the largest firms are boycotting it. Up to 300 lawyers will be picketing outside the Copley Marriott. Moreover, almost- first lady Tipper Gore, despite being under contract to appear as keynote speaker, has discovered she has other engagements.

The cause of all this is the MBA's award of Legislator of the Year to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman John Rogers (D-Norwood).

A little background. For at least a quarter-century, the MBA has handed out this award to politicians who have made "an exceptional improvement to the administration of justice." Of course, it doesn't hurt that those winners happen to be powerful, connected and in a position to do favors for lawyers.

So too with Rogers, who was cited by the MBA for his work on adoption. And the fact that he is responsible for the $23.5 billion state budget, is seen as a possible successor to Speaker Thomas Finneran and oversees things such as courthouse bond bills? Those were just icing on the cake.

But Rogers has a problem: He is also the principal sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which would ban gay marriages.

When it heard of the award to Rogers, a group that calls itself The Partners, made up of over 40 senior, gay lawyers from around town, objected strenuously. Hale and Dorr attorney Joseph Barri, calling Rogers "an aggressive homophobe," urged the MBA to withdraw the award. When it refused to do so, The Partners went to work.

Their success has left the MBA reeling. Nevertheless, MBA president Carol DiMento refuses to budge. The MBA in the past has been consistently in favor of gay issues (it even took a strong position against Rogers' bill). Even so, she argues, legislators should not be subject to a litmus test; they should be measured on a range of issues.

In most cases, she is right. But the story behind the story is how gay marriage, once a fringe matter, has moved front and center as the gay community's defining civil rights issue. It is no longer ANissue, but THEissue, a change that has caught many by surprise - even those who, like the MBA, regarded themselves as sympathetic to gay concerns.

The modern gay movement's genesis was in 1969, out of a riot at a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall. It was one of those "we're- not-gonna-take-it-anymore" moments, after which gays began to acknowledge their sexuality and push for legal rights.

At first, those demands were of the most basic kind, like simply asking that police not look the other way when gays were beaten up. But the gay movement rapidly evolved to the point of insisting that gays not be discriminated against in any capacity, in the same way we prohibit discrimination because of race, gender or religion.

And gay marriage? It wasn't even on the radar screen. In fact, many gays in the 1970s and 1980s disdained marriage. And while Americans in general were able to get comfortable with the notion of nondiscrimination, gay marriage ("It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve") left them deeply unsettled.

The predicament is this: If one buys the notion of nondiscrimination against gays, then gay marriage becomes almost inevitable. If one refuses to allow gay marriages, then the message is that homosexual relationships are less worthy than heterosexual relationships. It's that thinking that led the Vermont Supreme Court in 1999 to conclude that that state "is constitutionally required to extend to same-sex couples the common benefits and protections that flow from marriage."

Far from being peripheral, gay marriage was becoming the SINE QUA NONof the gay civil rights movement.

Which brings us back to Rogers and the MBA. To the MBA, one's position on gay marriage is akin to one's position on welfare reform or the role of patronage at Massport. It's important but hardly critical.

Not so to the gay community, which now sees gay marriage as a fundamental civil right. Today we look back 40 years with a sense of incredulity and disbelief that anyone could support segregation and miscegenation laws. Forty years from now, we may look back on tonight's events in the same way.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.

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