History > 2012 > USA > Gay rights (I)

Cal Grondahl

Cagle

16 May 2012

Cal Grondahl is the staff cartoonist

for the Utah Standard Examiner.

Illinois Clergy Members

Support Same-Sex Marriage

in Letter Signed by 260

December 23, 2012

The New York Times

By MAGGIE ASTOR

More than 250 religious leaders in Illinois have signed an open letter in support of same-sex marriage, which the legislature is likely to take up in January.

“We dedicate our lives to fostering faith and compassion, and we work daily to promote justice and fairness for all,” the leaders wrote in the letter, which was released Sunday. “Standing on these beliefs, we think that it is morally just to grant equal opportunities and responsibilities to loving, committed same-sex couples.

“There can be no justification,” they continued, “for the law treating people differently on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

This is not the first time members of the clergy have endorsed same-sex marriage, but the public nature of the letter and the number of signatures made it an especially strong statement.

The timing is also significant: State Senator Heather A. Steans and State Representative Greg Harris, both Democrats, plan to introduce a bill next month to legalize same-sex marriage. Ms. Steans said they would not put the legislation, the Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act, up for a vote unless they were confident it would pass. She added that the Senate, at least, was “definitely within striking distance” of the 30 votes needed for passage and that she hoped the letter would help persuade undecided legislators to support the bill.

Many of the 260 Christian and Jewish leaders who signed the letter said they had long supported same-sex marriage and were excited to make their views more public.

“It’s not a religious right — it’s a civil right,” said the Rev. Kevin E. Tindell, a United Church of Christ minister at New Dimensions Chicago. “It’s a matter of justice, and so as a Christian, as a citizen, I feel that it’s my duty.” Mr. Tindell, who is gay, is raising three children with his partner of 17 years.

The Rev. Kim L. Beckmann of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, who lives in the Chicago area, said she was drawn into the movement “as my gay and lesbian parishioners were welcomed into our congregation.”

“I have participated in blessings of these unions for longer than we’ve even been talking about marriage,” she said. “I’m thrilled to take this step.”

Laurie Higgins, cultural analyst for the Illinois Family Institute, which opposes same-sex marriage, criticized the branding of the issue as a matter of “equality” and “inclusion.”

“All adults, regardless of their sexual proclivities, are entitled to participate in the sexually complementary institution of marriage,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Those who identify as homosexual choose not to participate in it.”

The letter, Ms. Higgins said, “is signed quite obviously by faith leaders who have adopted radical, ahistorical, heretical theological views.”

“Their views are informed not by careful exegesis, but by personal desire and political convictions,” she said.

Signatories of the letter said one of their motivations was to challenge the assumption that religion went hand in hand with opposition to same-sex marriage.

The Rev. Kara Wagner Sherer of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Chicago said it was a way for religious leaders to say, “I’m a faithful Christian or a Jew or Muslim, and I think that marriage equality is important.”

“It doesn’t have to be a faith issue,” she said. “We understand our Scripture in a different way.”

The Episcopal Church endorsed same-sex marriage in July. Other denominations, including the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Roman Catholic Church, have reaffirmed their opposition.

Ms. Steans said she and Mr. Harris had been careful to ensure that the Illinois legislation would protect religious freedom. Under the proposed law, she said, “no faith has to solemnize a marriage they don’t want to.”

She added, though, that she had long believed that many religious leaders would like to conduct same-sex marriages, and that with the release of the letter, it was “very heartening to see that that will be the case.”

Ms. Beckmann, the Lutheran minister, also cited the leeway for denominations and congregations to choose whether to ordain same-sex marriages.

“We’ll sort it out as pastors and congregations and faith communities,” she said. “But as a pastor, I am looking for the freedom to have the opportunity to bring the joy and societal recognition, as well as the protections for all families, that marriage provides.”

Some signatories, though they emphasized the importance of religious leaders’ endorsing same-sex marriage, sought to distance the issue from religion.

“This has nothing to do with doctrine,” Mr. Tindell said. “This has to do with how families live and how families exist and how families come together today. All are God’s children, and we are all worthy of the rights afforded in this country.”

Ms. Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute, one of at least nine organizations in the Coalition to Protect Children and Marriage, which was formed to oppose the planned same-sex marriage legislation, also emphasized nonreligious arguments. She said the debate should be about how heterosexual marriage benefited society.

If marriage is “a public institution,” she said, “why is the government involved? The government has no interest in whether two people love each other. The government interest is in what best serves the future of any country — and what’s best for the future of the country is what’s best for children, and what best serves children is to be raised by their biological parents.”

Nine states and Washington, D.C., allow same-sex marriage, and 12 others, including Illinois, allow civil unions or domestic partnerships.

When Ms. Wagner Sherer’s congregation began blessing same-sex unions, some members were “on the fence,” she said. “But something about witnessing it was really important to them.”

Afterward, she said, many concluded: “We’re blessing two people who love each other. We’ve done this many times, and we understand it.”

    Illinois Clergy Members Support Same-Sex Marriage in Letter Signed by 260, NYT, 23.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/us/260-in-illinois-clergy-call-for-legal-gay-marriage.html

A Father’s Journey

December 22, 2012
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI

FOR a long while, my father’s way of coping was to walk quietly from the room. He doesn’t remember this. I do. I can still see it, still feel the pinch in my chest when the word “gay” came up — perhaps in reference to some event in the news, or perhaps in reference to me — and he’d wordlessly take his leave of whatever conversation my mother and my siblings and I were having. He’d drift away, not in disgust but in discomfort, not in a huff but in a whisper. I saw a lot of his back.

And I was grateful. Discomfort beat rejection. So long as he wasn’t pushing me away, I didn’t need him to pull me in. Heart-to-hearts weren’t his style, anyway. With Dad you didn’t discuss longings, anxieties, hurts. You watched football. You played cards. You went to dinner, you picking the place, him picking up the check. He always commandeered the check. It was the gesture with which he communicated everything he had trouble expressing in other ways.

But at some point Dad, like America, changed. I don’t mean he grew weepy, huggy. I mean he traveled from what seemed to me a pained acquiescence to a different, happier, better place. He found peace enough with who I am to insist on introducing my partner, Tom, to his friends at the golf club. Peace enough to compliment me on articles of mine that use the same three-letter word that once chased him off. Peace enough to sit down with me over lunch last week and chart his journey, which I’d never summoned the courage to ask him about before.

It’s been an extraordinary year, probably the most extraordinary yet in this country’s expanding, deepening embrace of gays and lesbians as citizens of equal stature, equal worth. For the first time, an American president still in office stated his belief that two men or two women should be able to marry. For the first time, voters themselves — not lawmakers, not courts — made same-sex marriage legal. This happened on Election Day in three states all at once: Maine, Maryland and Washington. A corner was turned.

And over the quarter-century leading up to it, at a succession of newspapers in a succession of cities, I interviewed scores of people about the progress we were making and why. But until last week, I couldn’t bring myself to examine that subject with the person whose progress has meant the most to me: my dad.

He’s 77. Closing in fast on 78. Hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since Kennedy. Pledged a fraternity in college. Served as an officer in the Navy. Chose accounting as his profession. Remained married to his high school sweetheart, my mother, until she died in 1996, just shy of their 40th anniversary. He still mentions her daily.

She was the freer spirit, and I told her I was gay back in 1981, when I was 17. She implored me not to tell him — too risky, she said — and to let her handle it. A few years later, she informed me that she’d done so, and that was that. Dad said nothing to me. I said nothing to him. When I would come home to Connecticut from college in North Carolina, he would give me the same kind of hug he’d always given me: manly, swift, sincere. When I was in graduate school in New York City, he would swoop into town to take me to the Four Seasons for duck.

I was sure that he’d resolved simply to put what he’d learned about me out of his mind and pretend it didn’t exist. I was wrong. He was mulling it over, trying to figure it out.

“It was just so unusual to me,” he recalled, groping for the right word.

He’d heard it said that gay people were somehow stunted, maybe even ill. But that made no sense to him, because he was confident that I was neither of those things.

He’d heard it said that peculiar upbringings turned children gay. “I thought about it a lot,” he said, “and I came to the conclusion that it had to be in your genes, in you, because I couldn’t think how the environment for you was any different than it was for your two brothers.”

He said he worried that I was in for a more difficult, less complete life than they and my sister were. I asked him why he’d never broached that with me. He said that it would have been an insult — that I was obviously smart enough to have assessed the terrain and figured out for myself how I was going to navigate it.

IN the years before Mom died, I had my first long-term relationship, and I could tell that seeing me coupled, just like my brothers and my sister were, gave him a new, less abstract way to understand me. I just wanted what they wanted. Someone special.

He welcomed the man I was with effusively. Took the two of us out to eat.

Then Mom was gone, and all the parenting fell to Dad. He tapped reserves I’d never imagined in him. When I broke up with the man he’d been so effusive toward, he must have told me six times how sorry he was about that. It was a message — that he was rooting for my happiness, no matter how that happiness came to me.

What he struggled most with, he admitted to me over our lunch, was his worry about what others would think of me, of him, of our family. His Italian-immigrant parents had been fanatics about the face a person presented to the world — the “bella figura,” as Italians say — and when I would write candidly about my life, as I did on occasion, he’d flinch a bit. Still does.

But he has decided that such writing is necessary. “There’s prejudice out there, and it’s good to fight that,” he said, adding that visibility and openness are obviously integral to that battle. “I’m convinced that people who don’t accept gays just don’t really know any of them.”

He’s increasingly irked at his political party, which he thinks is signing its own death warrant with its attitude toward gays, toward guns, toward immigrants. You have to bend to reality. Evolve with the times. Be open-minded. Be fair.

His evolution continues. Same-sex marriage is a tough one for him, as it is, still, for no small number of Americans. It’s as exotic a proposition as my being gay once was, a challenge to the way he understood the world and its traditions for so very long.

But he’s not prepared to say that what two committed men or two committed women share is anything less than what a man and a woman do. In any case, he noted, society is moving in only one direction on this front. And he’s O.K. with that.

As our meal ended he asked me — first time ever — if I wanted or planned on kids. I don’t. He said he was sad that I’d never be a father, because it was an experience with such deep satisfactions and so much joy.

Grabbing the check for once, I confessed that I’d long felt a measure of guilt about the extra burden I’d confronted him with, the added struggle.

He shook his head: “I almost think I love you more for it — for being what you are rather than what was expected of you.”

    A Father’s Journey, NYT, 22.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/bruni-a-fathers-journey-on-gay-marriage.html

Guiding Gay Evangelicals Out of the Campus Closet

December 21, 2012
The New York Times
By MARK OPPENHEIMER

In the DC Comics universe, Kate Kane is a lesbian who dons a mask to fight crime as Batwoman. In the real universe, Kate Kane is the pseudonym of a lesbian in her 20s who this year helped found QueerPHC, a blog for gay, lesbian and otherwise unstraight students and alumni of a conservative Christian college.

Michael P. Farris, the chancellor of that campus, Patrick Henry College, which he founded in 2000 to educate home-schooled evangelicals, threatened this month to sue the founders of QueerPHC for copyright infringement. He quickly withdrew that threat. But his public pique directed attention to a growing movement: alumni from evangelical Christian colleges who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or who otherwise identify as queer, and their straight allies, speaking up on behalf of gay students still on campus.

These alumni are reversing an old truism of campus life: that student radicals have to drag stodgy alumni into the modern age. But at these colleges, it is still difficult to be an openly gay student. And after graduating, gay and lesbian alumni and allies find each other, meet, push their colleges to be more liberal and reach out to undergraduates — offering affirmation that students do not get on campus.

Such groups for alumni of Patrick Henry; Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.; George Fox University in Newberg, Ore.; Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C.; and Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., have been established, most of them in the past two years. Some of the groups are tiny, their members anonymous. Some are big: about 700 Wheaton alumni have signed a letter supporting gay undergraduates.

“It was very isolating” to be a lesbian at Patrick Henry, said Ms. Kane, a recent graduate who insisted on staying masked behind her pseudonym. “And it was also very confusing, because growing up in a very conservative, fundamentalist environment, and going to a school with a similar environment, my sexuality was very repressed. I didn’t even know I was queer until a few years into my college experience.”

Speaking of shame, secrecy, the closet — Kate Kane plans to reveal her real name. “I have set a deadline for myself,” she said, “that I will come out by May 31, 2013. I’m hoping to come out in February or March.”

She would reveal her name on the phone to a reporter, but she wants to tell her parents about her sexuality in person. “I just don’t want them to find out on the Internet.”

The Christian alumni organizers all say they have heard from current undergraduates at their colleges who are grateful for the support. But faculty members, who at evangelical colleges usually must sign a statement of Christian faith, and who can more easily avoid influences from contemporary culture, may be holdouts who support traditional Christian teaching.

“The real issue on this is whether or not someone is created by God as gay or whether or not gay is a behavior pattern,” said Mr. Farris, the chancellor at Patrick Henry, which is Purcellville, Va. “We take the position it’s a behavior pattern. No one is created by God in this fashion.”

Mr. Farris is not sure that any students on his campus even face this problem.

“I am taking a reporter’s word for it that one alumna has self-identified as a lesbian,” Mr. Farris said. “Does that surprise me? No. Disappoint me? Yes. She violated the honor code for four years. She does not believe what we believe, and she said she did.”

Mr. Farris is not really right about that — when the blogger who uses the name Kate Kane began at Patrick Henry, she felt the way her chancellor did about same-sex attraction. “I told a couple of my classmates,” she said, “but it was sort of like I presented it to them as, ‘Oh, here’s this weird problem I have.’ And once I did start coming to terms with it, I was like, ‘Oh no, this is really bad, people will hate me if they find this out about me.’ ”

Patrick Henry is conservative even by the standards of its peers; Wheaton, Billy Graham’s alma mater, has a more ideologically diverse teaching staff — proof that faculty culture varies sharply among colleges that identify as evangelical.

“Thirty-one years ago, students could not come out as gay,” said Paul W. Wiens, who retired from Wheaton last year after 31 years of teaching music. “That would have been completely bad.”

Now, Dr. Wiens said, “if you took a vote, the faculty would say marriage is for men and women, but civil unions are fine, with all the rights of married couples.” And he added that the college chaplain “has been meeting with gay students who wish to do so, to just talk about whatever is on their mind. He is not trying to convert them, or change their sexual orientation.”

How can Dr. Wiens be so sure? “I know these things to be true, because my gay students told me they were.”

The Wheaton chaplain, Stephen B. Kellough, says he tries to support students with same-sex attraction, even as he challenges all unmarried students to be chaste. “When students come to me and talk about issues they are facing or wondering or struggling about in the area of sexuality, I am open to and supportive of those questions,” Dr. Kellough said.

But, he was asked, isn’t there a special message for students fighting same-sex urges about the need to overcome them?

“I think there is a call to chastity and faithfulness in singleness for homosexual students and heterosexual students,” the chaplain said, “and those challenges are similar.”

Christian colleges are in a bind. When they try to reinforce their traditional teachings, they can incite gay activism. The gay group OneWheaton was founded after a 2011 chapel talk by a Wheaton alumnus, Wesley Hill, who said he had same-sex attractions but had chosen to be celibate for life. “It was the only voice ever given at Wheaton: either gay people need to be celibate their entire life, or they need to change,” said OneWheaton’s founder, Adam Bidma.

So he helped write the founding letter, which he and friends distributed after a campus chapel service. “If you are a student and this is part of your story, your sexual identity is not a tragic sign of the sinful nature of the world,” the letter reads. “Your desire for companionship, intimacy and love is not shameful.”

    Guiding Gay Evangelicals Out of the Campus Closet, NYT, 21.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/gay-alumni-reach-out-to-closeted-undergraduates.html

Gustavo Archilla, an Inspiration for Gay Marriage, Dies at 96

December 15, 2012
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Gustavo Archilla, whose marriage in Canada in 2003 after almost six decades of a quiet and committed relationship inspired supporters of same-sex marriage, died on Nov. 27 on Marco Island, Fla., where he lived. He was 96.

The cause was complications of an aneurysm of the aorta, his niece Christina Dean said.

Mr. Archilla was strolling across Columbus Circle in New York in September 1945 when he met Elmer Lokkins. The men fell in love quickly, but not publicly.

For 58 years, they lived together in Manhattan at a don’t-ask-don’t-tell distance from the rest of the world — stable and secure in their mutual devotion but expertly practiced at not drawing attention to it, even as they lived for many years in the same house with some of Mr. Archilla’s younger siblings.

In time the secret became harder to keep. They were mostly accepted by their families, but their relationship was not openly discussed.

“Uncle Gus and Uncle Elmer,” their expanding collection of nieces and nephews called them, with not everyone realizing that the gregarious men who went everywhere together and were happy to take the children to the museum or the park were more than friends.

“Whether they were behind the door or out of the closet, it didn’t matter to them,” Ms. Dean said. “They just enjoyed life.”

Then, well into their 80s, they married, eloping to Canada in 2003 shortly after same-sex marriage became legal there. For the first time, they began showing affection for each other in public. They marched in gay rights parades, including the annual Wedding March in New York.

“Canada made it possible for us,” Mr. Archilla told a Wedding March crowd in 2007. “I hope everywhere else it will soon be possible. Maybe while we are still alive, though there is not much time left.”

News organizations sought them out for interviews. In a 2003 article in The New York Times, Mr. Archilla said of their decision to marry: “What we did was finally cap it all up — make it seem complete. It was about fulfilling this desire people have to dignify what you have done all your life — to qualify it by going through the ceremony so that it has the same seriousness, the same objective that anybody getting married would be entitled to.”

Gustavo Abimael Archilla was born on Dec. 7, 1915, in Mayagüez, P.R., the oldest of nine surviving children. His father, a Presbyterian minister, moved to New York when Gustavo was a boy, and his family soon followed.

Mr. Archilla’s mother died shortly after leaving Puerto Rico, and his father died when Mr. Archilla was a young man. Mr. Archilla became the primary caretaker for his younger siblings, working as an elevator operator, a waiter, a window decorator — whatever made ends meet.

After Mr. Lokkins became the registrar of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Mr. Archilla got a job as his assistant. They both retired in the 1970s.

Mr. Archilla and Mr. Lokkins moved to Marco Island in 2010 to be near Ms. Dean after their health declined. In addition to Mr. Lokkins and Ms. Dean, Mr. Archilla is survived by a brother, Eliel, and a large extended family.

Ms. Dean said her uncle closely followed the recent election, in which voters in three states approved same-sex marriage.

“He was watching it on TV every day,” she said. “He was all excited about it.”

    Gustavo Archilla, an Inspiration for Gay Marriage, Dies at 96, NYT, 15.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/nyregion/
    gustavo-archilla-whose-wedding-inspired-gay-marriage-advocates-dies-at-96.html

Standing and Delivering

December 12, 2012
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

Is it heretical of me, or merely quirky, to find myself nearly as fascinated by the procedural game the Supreme Court is playing in the same-sex marriage cases as I am by the underlying merits of the two appeals the court has agreed to decide?

After all, same-sex marriage is legal in nine states and the District of Columbia, and public opinion on the issue is evolving rapidly in other parts of the country, with or without the blessing of the United States Supreme Court. On the other hand, the procedural minefield the court has laid around these cases may hold implications reaching well beyond the domain of gay rights -- for the relationship of states to their citizens and for the balance of power between the president and Congress.

I say "may": the court, never exactly a model of transparency, was more than usually opaque in the orders it issued last Friday afternoon.

In accepting Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case on the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, prohibiting same-sex marriage, the justices instructed the parties to brief and argue the preliminary question "whether petitioners have standing under Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution in this case."

And in United States v. Windsor, the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages that are valid under state law, the court posed these additional questions:

"Whether the executive branch's agreement with the court below that DOMA is unconstitutional deprives this court of jurisdiction to decide this case" and "whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States House of Representatives has Article III standing in this case."

To start with what's clear about these questions: Article III, Section 2 is the constitutional provision that establishes the jurisdiction of the federal courts. From its earliest days, the Supreme Court has interpreted Article III as limiting federal jurisdiction to concrete cases, ongoing disputes between parties with an actual stake in the outcome. The court does not issue advisory opinions, as the justices informed President George Washington, whose secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, had requested one on the president's behalf.

The Constitution doesn't use the word "standing," but the concept plays a crucial role in the determination of Article III jurisdiction. In order to have standing to proceed in federal court, a plaintiff must have suffered actual harm rather than have a generalized grievance; the harm must have been caused by something the defendant did; and the problem can actually be addressed by the decision that the plaintiff seeks. (These requirements are usually referred to as injury-in-fact, causation and redressability.)

The standing doctrine has for years been a major site of contestation between liberal and conservative judges, between those whose priority is maintaining access to court to the greatest degree possible and those who believe that the constitutional separation of powers makes the courts ill-suited to resolve many of the problems that people try to bring to them. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court's other conservatives are decidedly in the latter camp, while the more liberal justices are somewhat less decidedly in the former. The chief justice has long made it clear that he cares a lot about keeping a tight lid on standing.

Standing has been an issue in the Proposition 8 case ever since the state of California decided not to appeal Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker's 2010 ruling that the proposition was unconstitutional. The appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was carried on by a group of people who had worked to get the proposition adopted. The Ninth Circuit questioned whether this group had the requisite Article III standing, and asked the California Supreme Court to tell it whether under California law, a ballot measure's proponents are regarded as properly standing in the state's shoes if the state decides not to defend the measure. When the state court answered yes, the Ninth Circuit took the answer as sufficient and proceeded to decide the appeal, finding Proposition 8 unconstitutional.

Whether standing under state law translates into standing for the purposes of Article III is a question that the United States Supreme Court has poked at but never resolved. Whether this is the right case in which to do so remains to be seen, but it was not particularly surprising for the court to raise the issue. In fact, in an era of direct democracy run amok, with voters being presented with extreme propositions that no rational state government would wish to embrace, a Supreme Court decision on who can carry the ball into federal court is probably overdue.

The justices' order in the DOMA case is a different matter. Here, the court's concern seems to be with the fact that the Obama administration dropped its defense of the Defense of Marriage Act in February 2011, when the Windsor case was pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The administration announced that while it would continue to apply DOMA, under the president's constitutional duty to enforce laws, it now believed that statutes discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation had to meet a heightened standard of judicial scrutiny, a test that it concluded DOMA would fail.

As required by law, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. notified Congress of the administration's decision to stop defending DOMA in court. "Our attorneys will also notify the courts of our interest in providing Congress a full and fair opportunity to participate in the litigation in those cases," Attorney General Holder said in his letter to Representative John A. Boehner, the House speaker. Democrats in Congress wanted no part of defending DOMA, even though the statute had passed both houses in 1996 by big bipartisan majorities and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. So a five-member House leadership body called the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group decided, over the objections of its two Democratic members, to take over the executive branch's abandoned defense of DOMA. The Republican members of the group, bipartisan in name but not in fact, hired Paul D. Clement, solicitor general in the administration of President George W. Bush, to handle their DOMA defense.

The executive branch's abandonment of a legal position is not an everyday affair, but it's hardly rare. Just recently, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. notified the Supreme Court that the government no longer believed it was on the right side of a case on immunity for federal prison guards accused of assaulting an inmate. The government's immunity position had prevailed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and the Supreme Court had agreed in September to hear the inmate's appeal, Millbrook v. United States. Now, Mr. Verrilli told the court last month, the government was prepared to argue that the Third Circuit's decision was wrong and should be overturned. Taking that development in stride, the justices are keeping the case on the calendar and last week appointed a private lawyer, Jeffrey S. Bucholtz, to argue the government's abandoned position.

Paul Clement himself, as solicitor general, informed Congress in 2004 that the government would not defend the constitutionality of a law requiring public mass transit agencies, as a condition of receiving federal money, to refuse to accept advertisements urging the legalization of marijuana. A Federal District Court had held that the ban amounted to viewpoint discrimination, prohibited by the First Amendment, a decision that Mr. Clement characterized as correct in his letter to the Senate legal counsel. "The government does not have a viable argument to advance in the statute's defense and will not appeal the district court's decision," he wrote. While that case never reached the Supreme Court, it's one example among many to show how often these issues arise.

That makes all the more puzzling the court's concern about whether it has jurisdiction in the DOMA case. While the government and the plaintiff, Edie Windsor, may agree about the law's unconstitutionality, they maintain opposite positions on whether Ms. Windsor owes more than $300,000 in federal estate tax on the property left to her by the woman to whom she was legally married in the eyes of New York State. Had she been married to a man, she would have inherited the property tax-free. With DOMA barring the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage, and the Obama administration taking the position that it will enforce the law until the Supreme Court or Congress tell it otherwise, there certainly seems to be a controversy between the parties sufficient to meet the test of Article III jurisdiction.

The standing of the House Republicans to carry on the litigation seems a closer question. This so-called bipartisan group doesn't even speak for the House of Representatives, let alone Congress. While the group has filed friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of Congress in several cases since its creation 20 years ago, its authority to stand in the executive branch's shoes as a party to a case is indistinct, to say the least. The court on Tuesday appointed Vicki C. Jackson, a Harvard law professor and an expert on federal jurisdiction, to argue the positions that neither side in the Windsor case is taking: that the court has no jurisdiction and that the House group has no standing. Her participation promises to turn this already intriguing case into a real - to borrow a phrase - intellectual feast.

If the justices find that the House group lacks standing, that would be enough to make the court dismiss the case - a victory for Ms. Windsor, since she won in both lower courts. Given the sketchiness of the group's claim to standing, the question remains why the court is turning cartwheels to get at the underlying question of jurisdiction, of whether the administration's agreement with the appeals court that the law is unconstitutional means that the Supreme Court has no power to decide the case.

My initial thought was that in granting the case, the court was giving itself a way out in the event that it got into too much of a wrangle on the merits. Under this scenario, the justices would be using the jurisdictional issue as a kind of safety valve for a deeply polarized court. But on reflection, that theory doesn't really make sense, because a finding of no jurisdiction under these circumstances would call into question the court's ability to deal with other instances of changed government positions, and would be inconsistent with the action the court took just last week in the prison immunity case. Further, a finding of no jurisdiction would amount to a huge grant of power to the executive branch at the expense of Congress, enabling the president to cut off further judicial review any time a law that he never liked in the first place is declared unconstitutional by a lower court. While executive power certainly has its fans on the court, including Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia, I'd be surprised if that sweeping proposition could capture five votes.

So here's another theory about what's going on at the court, and I emphasize that it's just a theory. I suspect there is a profound battle over the meaning of Article III jurisdiction, an issue proving so divisive that the justices haven't yet permitted it to fully surface. There was a hint of this last term, in a decision that never saw the light of day. The case was First American Financial v. Edwards, challenging a provision of an obscure federal law, the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), under which home buyers defrauded by title companies can sue for damages without needing to show that they suffered an actual financial injury. While Congress indisputably conferred on these consumers the right to sue, the question was whether it was a grant of standing that met the requirements of Article III.
The case was argued in December of last year, and Chief Justice Roberts assigned the opinion to Justice Clarence Thomas. That was not apparent at the time to the world outside the court, but it became apparent as the term went on without a decision and it was clear that Justice Thomas was the only member of the court who had not produced an opinion from the December argument sitting. By late spring, with the health care case pending, it was easy to forget about First American Financial. On June 28, the last day of the term, health care decision day, the court announced that it was dismissing the case as "improvidently granted."

What was the story behind this baffling "never mind"? All I'm sure of is that there is one. My guess is that Justice Thomas had drafted and circulated an opinion, grounded in an extremely narrow reading of Article III jurisdiction, that was so sweeping as to disable Congress from passing laws that along with granting statutory rights also give people access to court to vindicate those rights. I suspect it was an opinion so radical in its implications - a kind of jurisdictional nuclear option -- that Justice Thomas was unable to hold a majority, and that the court remained so divided in the aftermath that no one else could put together a majority as the term's clock ran out.

If I'm right, the First American debacle resolved nothing beyond pushing off to another day, another case, the battle over the dimensions of federal jurisdiction. Granted, this was not everyone's first thought upon hearing that the Supreme Court would rule on a Defense of Marriage Act case. It wasn't mine, either. But as I said at the beginning of this column, it's fascinating.

    Standing and Delivering, NYT, 12.12.2012,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/standing-and-delivering/

For Marriage Equality, the Work’s Not Just in Court

December 10, 2012
The New York Times
By EVAN WOLFSON

PROPONENTS of same-sex marriage had good reason to celebrate last week; the Supreme Court announced that it could restore the freedom to marry in California and end federal discrimination against the marriages celebrated by same-sex couples in the nine states (along with the District of Columbia) that have the freedom to marry.

For those who believe, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did, that the arc of history is long, but bends toward justice, the prospect of a landmark ruling that would add the United States to the growing list of nations that grant gay people the freedom to marry — including Argentina, Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa — is a cause for much hope. But even though American public opinion on the matter has shifted more rapidly than almost anyone could have predicted as recently as a decade ago, supporters of marriage equality can’t just sit and wait for change.

On the merits, the Supreme Court’s task should be easy. More than 200 years of federal jurisprudence shows that the government has nearly always automatically honored the marriages of couples legally married in states or even other countries. By constitutional standards and tradition, same-sex couples married in New York should receive the same 1,138 (or so) federal protections and responsibilities provided opposite-sex couples who marry here. These rights — and not just rights, but also obligations — include Social Security, family leave, health coverage, immigration policy and tax payment.

The so-called Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, effectively created a “gay exception” to this centuries-old approach. In 10 recent rulings, a succession of federal trial and appellate judges has deemed this exception unconstitutional. These judges — including jurists appointed by the Republican presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes — agree that in America, we don’t have second-class citizens, and we shouldn’t have second-class marriages, either.

The Proposition 8 case challenges California’s stripping away the freedom to marry from one group of couples — those of the same sex — and asks whether it is acceptable for a majority to vote away freedoms (like the freedom to marry) from a minority. Both a federal district court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit have rightly said no. The Supreme Court itself has affirmed the right to marry as a fundamental constitutional freedom 14 times — in cases involving, for example, restrictions on interracial couples and the right of prisoners to marry. The Prop 8 case offers the prospect of final vindication of that underlying freedom to marry. If being right on the law and having good lawyers were enough, we would have won the freedom to marry years ago. But history tells us that a key to prevailing before the justices is to make the same strong case in the court of public opinion as we make in the courts of law. Yes, there are only a precious six months before the court hands down its biggest decisions next June. It is in that narrow window of opportunity that proponents of same-sex marriage, who have already worked so hard and made such progress in altering public opinion and securing marriage rights in many states and countries, must redouble their efforts.

We’ve seen from other social justice movements that national resolution on historically contentious civil rights questions typically comes after a long period of work, during which advocates build a critical mass of states that end discrimination and a critical mass of public support, which empowers the Supreme Court or Congress to then establish fundamental rights throughout the nation. This is a pattern that abolitionists, supporters of women’s enfranchisement, the modern African-American freedom movement and advocates for people with disabilities — among many others — have followed.

So what can be done in the next six months?

First, rack up more state-level victories. By 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on interracial marriage in the appropriately named case Loving v. Virginia, two-thirds of the states had already ended interracial marriage bans. By that measure — and it’s a measure, not a rule or a formula — supporters of same-sex marriage still have a ways to go. But our four-for-four victories at the ballot box last month increased by half — in one night — the number of United States jurisdictions where gay couples can marry: adding Maine, Maryland and Washington to New York and five other states plus the District of Columbia. (In Minnesota, same-sex couples are still denied marriage licenses, but voters rebuffed a proposed amendment that would have added the ban to the state constitution.)

Along with local families and advocates, Freedom to Marry is already looking to 2013 legislative victories within reach in states like Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Second, we need to continue the momentum in public opinion. At the time of the Loving ruling, 70 percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage. By contrast, support for same-sex couples’ freedom to marry has literally doubled from 27 percent in 1996 — the year a Hawaii state judge ruled that same-sex couples had a right to marry, a ruling later pre-empted by a state constitutional amendment — to 54 percent today. This growing majority includes, remarkably, a supermajority of younger Americans, nearly two-thirds of Catholics, a majority of Latinos and pluralities of African-Americans and Asian-Americans. The freedom to marry is one of the few questions on which Dick Cheney and Barack Obama agree, and it’s of more than symbolic importance that two titans of the Supreme Court bar, the conservative lawyer Theodore B. Olson and the liberal litigator David Boies, have joined forces on the case challenging Prop 8.

Public opinion doesn’t shift on its own; hearts are opening and minds are changing because of persuasion and discussion, evidence and experience. With increased urgency, it’s our job to grow, diversify and mobilize that majority, conversation by conversation. Through campaigns like Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry and Mayors for the Freedom to Marry; public statements by business leaders like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and labor leaders like Richard Trumka of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.; the support of the N.A.A.C.P. and a growing number of organizations representing Latinos, the largest ethnic minority group; and above all, personal conversations between family members and neighbors, we are continuing to persuade Americans that it’s time to do right by all families and get on the right side of history. For that matter, the United States needs to catch up with its neighbors; Canada ended marriage discrimination years ago, and last week, the Mexican Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the freedom to marry.

I am the kind of gay guy far more likely to quote Broadway lyrics than use sports metaphors, but let me give it a shot: Our opponents have spent the last 15 years continually moving the goal posts. They claimed we could never get Americans to put “gay” and “marriage” in the same sentence; we’ve grown a national majority for marriage. They claimed only the coasts would support the freedom to marry; we’ve won in Iowa and Minnesota.

They claimed courts would never uphold the freedom to marry; that a sitting president would never run on (rather than away from) support for the freedom to marry; that Republicans would never join Democrats in voting for freedom-to-marry bills. Wrong, wrong, wrong. (In New York, Republican state senators provided the margin of victory for the legalization of same-sex marriage last year.)

Now here we are, with the Supreme Court heading toward decisions on both the state and federal marriage discrimination that same-sex couples endure. And if we do our part over the next months, building on the irrefutable momentum of 2011 and 2012, we can give the justices confidence that when they stand on the right side of history, their rulings will not only stand the test of time, but be true to where the American people already are.

Evan Wolfson is the founder and president of Freedom to Marry and the author

of “Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry.”

    For Marriage Equality, the Work’s Not Just in Court, NYT, 10.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/opinion/for-marriage-equality-the-works-not-just-in-court.html

Next Civil Rights Landmark

December 7, 2012
The New York Times

Fifty-eight years after it banned discrimination in public education, the Supreme Court has set the stage for the defining civil rights decision of this era — agreeing to hear two cases challenging laws that define marriage to exclude couples of the same sex. To us, and a growing number of Americans, the right course seems clear: that the justices continue the march toward real equality.

In one of the cases, the justices will review a ruling earlier this year by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, which struck down California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage.

The Supreme Court could leave California’s same-sex marriage ban in place, planting the court on the wrong side of justice and equality. Or, in the absence of a five-vote majority to establish a nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court could affirm the narrower approach of the Ninth Circuit panel, which was confined to California.

The appellate panel reasoned that Proposition 8, as the voter initiative was known, was unconstitutional because it stripped gays, lesbians and bisexuals of the right to marry declared by the State Supreme Court. Thus it harmed “the status and dignity of the members of a disfavored class.”

The second case the Supreme Court will hear is a challenge to Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, the odious 1996 law that denies federal benefits to lawfully married same-sex couples. The case concerns Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer of New York, who were married in 2007 in Canada.

Because the Defense of Marriage Act did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse when Ms. Spyer died in 2009, she was required to pay some $360,000 in federal estate taxes from which opposite-sex spouses are exempt. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, sensibly said that violated the Constitution’s promise of equal protection. The ruling against the Defense of Marriage Act, the second by a federal appeals court, said laws treating same-sex couples differently deserve heightened judicial scrutiny, like other laws that single out minorities long subjected to discrimination.

These profound legal tests have reached the nation’s highest court at a remarkable moment. There has been a string of persuasive lower federal court rulings against the Defense of Marriage Act and the denial of gay people’s freedom to marry.

A month ago, voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington State became the first to approve same-sex marriage at the ballot box rather than through courts or legislatures. Voters in Minnesota rejected a ballot measure that would have enshrined the state’s ban on same-sex marriage in the State Constitution.

Public opinion is shifting on this issue as more people recognize the inherent wrong in a last bastion of official discrimination. The most important hearts and minds to be won at this point belong to the nine justices.

    Next Civil Rights Landmark, NYT, 7.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/opinion/next-civil-rights-landmark.html

Supreme Court Will Take Up Two Cases on Gay Marriage

December 7, 2012
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would enter the national debate over same-sex marriage, agreeing to hear a pair of cases challenging state and federal laws that define marriage to include only unions of a man and a woman.

One of the cases, from California, could establish or reject a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The justices could also rule on narrower grounds that would apply only to marriages in California.

The second case, from New York, challenges a federal law that requires the federal government to deny benefits to gay and lesbian couples married in states that allow such unions.

The court’s move comes against the backdrop of a rapid shift in public attitudes about same-sex marriage, with recent polls indicating that a majority of Americans support allowing such unions. After the elections last month, the number of states authorizing same-sex marriage increased by half, to nine.

The court’s docket is now crowded with cases about the meaning of equality, with the new cases joining ones on affirmative action in higher education and on the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Decisions in all of the cases are expected by June.

The new California case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, was filed in 2009 by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, two lawyers who were on opposite sides in the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, which settled the 2000 presidential election. The suit argued that California voters had violated the federal Constitution the previous year when they overrode a decision of the state’s Supreme Court allowing same-sex marriages.

A federal judge in San Francisco agreed, issuing a broad decision that said the Constitution required the state to allow same-sex couples to marry. The decision has been stayed.

A divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, also in San Francisco, affirmed the decision. But the majority relied on narrower grounds that seemed calculated to avoid Supreme Court review or, at least, attract the vote of the presumed swing member of that court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt, writing for the majority, relied heavily on a 1996 majority opinion from Justice Kennedy in Romer v. Evans, which struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that had banned the passage of laws protecting gay men and lesbians. The voter initiative in California, known as Proposition 8, had done something similar, Judge Reinhardt wrote.

That reasoning, he added, meant that the ruling was confined to California.

“We do not doubt the importance of the more general questions presented to us concerning the rights of same-sex couples to marry, nor do we doubt that these questions will likely be resolved in other states, and for the nation as a whole, by other courts,” he wrote.

“For now,” he said, “it suffices to conclude that the people of California may not, consistent with the federal Constitution, add to their state Constitution a provision that has no more practical effect than to strip gays and lesbians of their right to use the official designation that the state and society give to committed relationships, thereby adversely affecting the status and dignity of the members of a disfavored class.”

The Supreme Court has several options in reviewing the decision. It could reverse it, leaving California’s ban on same-sex marriage in place. It could affirm it on the narrower theory, which would allow same-sex marriage in California but not require it elsewhere. Or it could address the broader question of whether the Constitution requires states to allow such marriages.

A plaintiff in the case, Kristin M. Perry, said she hoped that the justices would answer yes to that last question. “There is nothing more important,” she said, “than a state ridding itself of discriminatory laws that hurt its citizens every day.”

Brian S. Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, said the court should address the broader question but say no. “What’s at stake,” he said, “is whether the Constitution demands a redefinition of marriage and whether states can even vote on this issue.”

The second case the court agreed to hear, United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, challenges a part of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. Section 3 of the law defines marriage as between only a man and a woman for the purposes of more than 1,000 federal laws and programs. (Another part of the law, not before the court, says that states need not recognize same-sex marriages from other states.)

The case concerns two New York City women, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer, who married in 2007 in Canada. Ms. Spyer died in 2009, and Ms. Windsor inherited her property. The 1996 law did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse, and she faced a tax bill of about $360,000 that a spouse in an opposite-sex marriage would not have had to pay.

Ms. Windsor sued, and in October the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, struck down the 1996 law. The decision was the second from a federal appeals court to do so, joining one in May from a court in Boston. The Windsor case made its way to the Supreme Court unusually quickly because the parties had filed an appeal from the trial court’s decision in the case, which also struck down the law, even before the appeals court had ruled.

Ms. Windsor, 83, said she was “absolutely thrilled” that the court had agreed to hear her case, adding, “I wish Thea was here to see what is going on.”

There was reason to think that Justice Elena Kagan was not free to hear an appeal from the Boston case because she had worked on it or a related case as United States solicitor general. The current solicitor general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., gave the court a number of other options, including Windsor, probably partly to make sure that a case of such importance could be heard by a full nine-member court.

The Obama administration’s attitude toward same-sex marriage and the 1996 law has shifted over time. Until last year, the Justice Department defended the law in court, as it typically does for all acts of Congress. In February 2011, though, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he and President Obama had concluded that the law was unconstitutional and unworthy of defense in court, though he added that the administration would continue to enforce the law.

In May of this year, Mr. Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage.

After the Justice Department stepped aside, House Republicans intervened to defend the law. They are represented by Paul D. Clement, a solicitor general in the Bush administration.

The Windsor case is thus likely to feature a rematch between Mr. Clement and Mr. Verrilli, who were antagonists this year in the arguments over Mr. Obama’s health care law. The two cases are likely to be argued in late March, about a year after the health care case was heard.

    Supreme Court Will Take Up Two Cases on Gay Marriage, NYT, 7.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/us/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-two-cases-on-gay-marriage.html

In Maine and Maryland,

Victories at the Ballot Box for Same-Sex Marriage

November 7, 2012
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Voters in Maine and Maryland approved same-sex marriage on an election night that jubilant gay rights advocates called a historic turning point, the first time that marriage for gay men and lesbians has been approved at the ballot box.

While six states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage through court decisions or legislative decisions, voters had rejected it more than 30 times in a row.

Results for the other two states voting on same-sex marriage, Minnesota and Washington, were still coming in late Tuesday, but rights groups said that the victories in two states and possibly more were an important sign that public opinion was shifting in their direction.

“We have made history for marriage equality by winning our first victory at the ballot box,” said Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, which raised millions of dollars for the races in the four states.

Matt McTighe, the campaign manager for Mainers United for Marriage, said, “A lot of families in Maine just became more stable and secure.”

At a victory party in Baltimore, supporters of Maryland’s referendum danced and cheered as balloons filled the air. “I’m so elated right now,” said Mary Bruce Leigh, 32. “This is the civil rights issue of our time, and we have succeeded in Maryland.”

In what appeared to be a close race in Minnesota, voters were asked to adopt a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman. While the state already has a law barring same-sex marriage, conservatives hoped to prevent a future Legislature or court decision from reversing it.

In Washington State, supporters of a referendum authorizing same-sex marriage appeared to have an edge in pre-election polls, but final results were not expected until later this week because ballots were still being mailed in as late as Tuesday.

Laurie Carlsson, 33, stood on a freeway overpass with a sign urging drivers to honk for the referendum.

“Seattleites do not use their horns — ever — but today they’re honking,” Ms. Carlsson said as a deafening roar erupted. “It’s making me giddy.”

It has been a constant theme of opponents of same-sex marriage that whenever it has been put before voters it has lost. In 30 states, voters have limited marriage to a man and a woman through constitutional amendments, and same-sex marriage has also been blocked in referendums like those in California in 2008 and Maine in 2009.

This year, the legislatures in Washington and Maryland approved same-sex marriage, but opponents gathered enough signatures to force referendums. In Maine, since their loss in 2009, gay rights advocates have been cultivating public opinion in one-on-one conversations, and this year sponsored their successful repeat election.

In the final week of the campaign, the opponents of marriage rights, mainly financed by the National Organization for Marriage and the Roman Catholic Church, mounted a barrage of advertising and telephone appeals in all four states, trying to convince undecided voters that “redefining marriage” would force schools to “teach gay marriage” and require businesses and churches to violate religious principles.

Rights groups have denounced those messages as misleading scare tactics and say they do not seek to redefine marriage but to end discrimination.

For many weeks, reflecting their more than threefold advantage in fund-raising nationwide, advocates of same-sex marriage have unleashed advertisements of their own in which community members say that gay and lesbian friends deserve the same chance to love and marry that others enjoy.

Pre-election polling in Washington State indicated that a slight majority of voters supported the referendum. “We have weathered their waves of attacks and not lost any ground,” said Zach Silk, the campaign manager of Washington United for Marriage, in an interview before the voting began.

Frank Schubert, who managed the campaigns to ban same-sex marriage in all four states, disputed the notion that Tuesday’s ballots were a major turning point. “The votes are very close everywhere,” he said.

 

Isolde Raftery contributed reporting from Seattle,

and Emmarie Huetteman from Baltimore.

    In Maine and Maryland, Victories at the Ballot Box for Same-Sex Marriage, NYT, 7.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/same-sex-marriage-voting-election.html

U.S. Marriage Act Is Unfair to Gays, Court Panel Says

October 18, 2012
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that gay Americans are a class of people who deserve the same kinds of constitutional protections as many other victims of discrimination.

The 2-to-1 ruling, by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, came as the panel struck down the federal law prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriage. It is the first time that a federal appeals court has applied this level of constitutional protection — known as heightened scrutiny — to those unions. The case is now considered by some legal scholars to be the leading candidate for a Supreme Court review of the same-sex marriage issue.

Thursday’s decision was the second by a federal appeals court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. Now the case, Windsor v. United States, could be considered by the Supreme Court, or the court could choose other cases in its pipeline concerning same-sex marriage. Those include an earlier decision on the act by the First Circuit in Boston and one from the Ninth Circuit overturning California’s ban on same-sex marriage. It could also decide to hear all of them.

“It’s an incredible moment in the struggle for gay rights in this country,” said James D. Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s project dealing with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

The new case was brought on behalf of Edith Windsor of New York City, who married her longtime partner, Thea Clara Spyer, in 2007 in Canada. When Ms. Spyer died in 2009, Ms. Windsor inherited her property. Because the Internal Revenue Service was not allowed, under the Defense of Marriage Act, to consider her a surviving spouse, she faced a tax bill of $363,053 that she would not have had to pay if the marriage had been recognized.

Because the Supreme Court now has disagreement among circuits on a major issue of law involving the Defense of Marriage act, “this makes it more likely” that the Supreme Court will take up the cases, said Douglas NeJaime, an associate professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He said the most important justice in consideration of marriage cases was likely to be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has sided with the liberal majority on such cases as Lawrence v. Texas, in which he wrote the opinion that struck down state sodomy laws.

As Justice Kennedy has proved mindful of federalism issues, Professor NeJaime said, he might be reluctant to take a case in which federal courts have struck down a state law like Proposition 8, in California. The Defense of Marriage Act cases, by contrast, struck down a federal law, and any decision by the Supreme Court would have an effect only in states that allow same-sex marriage. “This is the kind of case that would appeal to Justice Kennedy for the court’s first intervention on same-sex marriage,” he predicted.

It could also be a likelier case for the court to take instead of the First Circuit case because it could be heard by the full court, Professor NeJaime said. Justice Elena Kagan might recuse herself from hearing the First Circuit case because of her former role as solicitor general, leaving the possibility that the other justices could find themselves in a 4-4 tie.

Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, and in 2010 a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down the law as unconstitutional, declaring that restrictions on same-sex marriage had no rational basis and failed even the most lenient test for constitutional scrutiny. That decision was upheld in May 2012 by the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which also declared the act unconstitutional.

The Obama administration initially defended the marriage act under the Department of Justice’s traditional role of defending acts of Congress as presumptively constitutional. In February 2011, however, the Justice Department declined to defend the act in court, though the government continued to enforce the law. The House created what it called the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group to take on the case under the leadership of Paul Clement, a former solicitor general in the administration of President George W. Bush.

Mr. Clement did not respond to requests for comment.

The majority opinion on Thursday was written by Judge Dennis Jacobs, the chief judge of the circuit; he was appointed by the first President Bush. The decision was joined by Christopher F. Droney, who was appointed by President Obama. Judge Chester J. Straub, appointed by President Bill Clinton, filed a partial dissent in which he argued that the issue of same-sex marriage “is not for the courts to decide, but rather an issue for the American people and their elected representatives to settle through the democratic process.”

The court in the Windsor case parted ways with previous courts by elevating the standard of review for laws restricting same-sex marriage to what is known as “heightened scrutiny,” and which is based in large part on whether the people subject to the law have been discriminated against.

“It is easy to conclude that homosexuals have suffered a history of discrimination,” the court wrote. Thus they are part of what the law refers to as a “quasi-suspect” class that deserves any law restricting its rights to be subjected to such “heightened scrutiny.” Because the law could not pass that test, Judge Jacobs wrote, it is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

Ultimately, Judge Jacobs wrote, the court’s legal analysis “sidesteps the fair point that same-sex marriage is unknown to history and tradition,” but those are questions concerning “holy matrimony,” not the civil status recognized under the law. “A state may enforce and dissolve a couple’s marriage, but it cannot sanctify or bless it,” he wrote. “For that, the pair must go next door.”

Ms. Windsor, speaking on Thursday afternoon at a news conference, proclaimed herself “thrilled” by the decision. Ms. Windsor, who is 83, said that she found it “so offensive that this woman that I lived with and adored, and had loved me, that they treated her as if she was a stranger in my life.”

Ms. Spyer, she said, is “here with me in spirit and would have been so proud to see how far we’ve come.”

Alex Vadukul contributed reporting.

    U.S. Marriage Act Is Unfair to Gays, Court Panel Says, NYT, 18.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/us/appeals-court-rules-against-defense-of-marriage-act.html

At Long Last, Dignity?

October 8, 2012
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI

Cape Neddick, Me.

If you live for 80 years, Chuck Bennett told me, you see things you never imagined. Crazy, fantastical stuff.

A man on the moon. “Amazing,” he said.

The Soviet Union’s disintegration. “Also amazing.”

And on Nov. 6, if the polls are right and his hope is fulfilled, the people of Maine may pass a referendum for same-sex marriage, which no state has adopted by popular vote before.

“That’s equally amazing to me,” he said. Ten minutes later, he circled back to say it again. “I would like to reiterate how amazing it is.”

Bennett was born in 1932 and grew up in Brooklyn without anything but slurs and clinical terms to describe his attraction to other men. In the late 1950s, he was forced out of the Navy for being gay.

He never found a long-term romantic partner, thwarted in part by a disapproving society with no obvious role models for him, and he bought his dream house on the ocean here 15 years ago with two close friends, because he didn’t want to grow old alone and didn’t expect to meet anyone special, not so late in the game.

“You know that old saying, Born 50 years too soon?” he asked me. “I think I do feel something of that.”

Maine is one of four states with same-sex marriage on the ballot on Election Day, a crucial moment for advocates and opponents alike. The referendums are the first and best tests of popular sentiment since President Obama’s history-making statement of support in May. (For more on this, visit my blog.)

In Minnesota, the vote is on an amendment to the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But in Maine, Maryland and Washington, the vote is to permit it, and thus to join the six states where it’s already legal, thanks to legislatures or courts.

Advocates are most optimistic about Maine, and I traveled here last weekend for a sense of what victory would mean to someone who’d known and braved a much different world. I found my way to Bennett, a courteous man with a soulful gaze and a precise way of speaking that reflects his long career in academia, first as a college English professor, then as a dean.

He recalled that during his teenage years, his only assurances that there were other people like him were newspaper stories about men arrested on Fire Island for “obscene” or “depraved” behavior.

For a while he dated women, but couldn’t summon any real passion for them. He wasn’t sure where that left him. Clearly, he wouldn’t marry. But what about a relationship like that with a man?

In his late 30s, he had one, and wanted it to go on forever. It lasted five years. Nothing like it ever came along again.

He felt the need to be secretive about his sexuality and kept work colleagues at a distance. His parents died without knowing he was gay.

Starting in the mid-1980s, he marveled at the proliferation of gay characters in movies and on TV. He later joined efforts to end the ban on gays in the military, giving money to the cause.

But when gay advocates started talking about marriage, he thought it nuts, partly because they were buying into such a flawed institution. But also, he said, “The likelihood of winning was so, so far-fetched.”

One of his housemates, David Newman, 71, who is also gay, still has trouble understanding the way “I do” and gold bands became such an ardent, defining quest. He spent a lifetime trying, out of painful necessity, not to be tormented by the straight world’s norms, which excluded him.

“How can somebody like me, who has made a significant investment in inventing an alternative world, come around to accept gay marriage?” he asked, clarifying that he supports the referendum. It’s just unsettling to him, this challenge to what he thought he was supposed to believe about such conventions.

For Bennett, the marriage focus of the Maine referendum is almost beside the real point, which is validation.

“I see it as something of profound significance,” he said. “Whether anyone winds up getting married in Maine, I don’t care. I care that they can get married.” That right means that gay people are equal to straight people. It recognizes their dignity. His dignity.

I asked him if the absence of such recognition during most of his life made him bitter.

“I was fortunate,” he said, explaining that his family wasn’t especially religious and his nature isn’t self-punishing, so he never felt that being gay was some abomination. But it was certainly a limitation. A cause for hiding, or at least holding essential parts of himself in reserve.

“I’m inclined to look back not in anger, as John Osborne once said, but with some degree of sadness,” he said. “Everyone could have been happier. Everyone could have been more fulfilled if they hadn’t been burdened with this prejudice.”

    At Long Last, Dignity?, NYT, 8.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/opinion/bruni-at-long-last-dignity.html

California Is First State to Ban Gay ‘Cure’ for Minors

September 30, 2012
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

California has become the first state to ban the use for minors of disputed therapies to “overcome” homosexuality, a step hailed by gay rights groups across the country that say the therapies have caused dangerous emotional harm to gay and lesbian teenagers.

“This bill bans nonscientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide,” Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement on Saturday after he signed the bill into law. “These practices have no basis in science or medicine, and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”

The law, which is to take effect on Jan. 1, states that no “mental health provider” shall provide minors with therapy intended to change their sexual orientation, including efforts to “change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

The law was sponsored by State Senator Ted W. Lieu and supported by a long list of medical and psychological societies, as well by state and national advocates for gay rights. Also speaking up for the ban were former patients who described emotional scars they said they were left with after being pushed into the therapy by their parents and finding that they could not change their sexual orientation or did not want to.

But some therapists and conservative religious leaders who promote methods that they say can reduce homosexual desire have condemned the new law as a violation of free choice. They say that it will harm young people who want to fight homosexual attractions on religious or other grounds and warn that it will lead more people to seek help from untrained amateurs.

The use of harsh aversion techniques, like electric shock or nausea-inducing drugs, to combat homosexual desires has largely disappeared. But during the last three decades, some psychologists have refined a theory of “reparative therapy,” which ties homosexual desires to emotional wounds in early childhood and, in some cases, to early sexual abuse.

These therapists say that with proper treatment, thousands of patients have succeeded in reducing their homosexual attraction and in enhancing heterosexual desire, though most therapists acknowledge that total “cures” are rare. But their methods have come under growing attack from gays who say the therapy has led to guilt, hopelessness and anger.

Reparative therapists, a small minority within the mental health profession, united in 1992 in the National Association for Research and Therapy on Homosexuality, based in Encino, Calif. The group did not immediately comment on the new California law, but its leaders have previously attacked the legislation as based on politics, not science, and said they would consider challenging it in court as an unjustified intrusion into professional practice.

One licensed family therapist and member of the association, David H. Pickup of Glendale, Calif., said in a recent interview that the ban would cause harm to many who want and need the therapy.

“If boys have been sexually abused and homosexual feelings that are not authentic later come up, we have to tell them no, we can’t help you,” Mr. Pickup said.

Gay and lesbian leaders, along with major scientific groups, reject such theories outright and say there is no scientific evidence that inner sexual attractions can be altered.

“Reparative therapy is junk science being used to justify religious beliefs,” said Wayne Besen, the director of Truth Wins Out, a gay advocacy group.

The California law is a milestone, but only a first step, Mr. Besen said, because the ideas in reparative therapy have been widely adopted by church ministries and others promoting the idea that homosexual urges can be banished.

Legislators in New Jersey and a few other states have discussed introducing similar bills to ban the use of the therapy for minors, Mr. Besen said.

    California Is First State to Ban Gay ‘Cure’ for Minors, NYT, 30.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/us/california-bans-therapies-to-cure-gay-minors.html

Since Suicide,

More Resources for Transgender and Gay Students

September 21, 2012
The New York Times
By ARIEL KAMINER

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — It has been two years since Tyler Clementi, a gay freshman at Rutgers University, committed suicide after learning that his roommate had ridiculed his sexuality and invited friends to spy on him and another man through a webcam. That terrible episode brought the school national attention, none of it welcome: previously known as a large and diverse state school, Rutgers became associated with homophobia and cruelty.

But today, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and their supporters can choose from four specialized housing options, three of them new, ranging from a service to pair them with like-minded roommates to Rainbow Perspectives, a floor in a residence hall organized around common interests. They can now turn for support to the 130 staff and faculty members who have been trained as official campus liaisons, or to the graduates of a new training program for “allies,” whose inaugural session is already booked to capacity. This year’s edition of a handbook that lists campus resources for “queer issues” is 92 pages long.

And this week, Campus Pride, an organization that rates schools based on the inclusiveness of their policies, upgraded Rutgers’s main campus in New Brunswick to the maximum rating, five stars. Out of the 32 possible categories in which a school can distinguish itself, Rutgers scored in 31.

Rutgers has a long history of inclusiveness; when the Rutgers Homophile League was founded in 1969, for example, it was only the second such student group in the nation. But since Mr. Clementi’s death on Sept. 22, 2010, the university has increased its efforts, propelled by a vocal campus community, an energetic administrator and an urgent need for damage control.

Even some of the students have been startled by the strength of Rutgers’s embrace.

In 2011, shortly before the start of her first year at Rutgers, Nicole Margolies was talking with a housing supervisor when she blurted out: “I’m transgender, and I don’t know what to do about it. Where do I go?” Nick, as the student is now known, feared he might not even be allowed on campus. Instead, he said, when he got there the name on his dorm room door was up-to-date. His professors addressed him as “he.” And no one made him feel it was anything other than normal.

“Boom,” he said. “Mind blown.”

At the center of all this activity is Jenny Kurtz, the head of the Rutgers Center for Social Justice Education and L.G.B.T. Communities. Speaking in mile-a-minute uptalk, she sounds like an especially caffeinated undergraduate. But with her blonde bob, oversize dark glasses and stacked heels, she looks more like a junior Hollywood agent and stands out easily on a laid-back campus of baseball hats and jeans.

Ms. Kurtz said one of the big priorities of her job was to “create allies” — people whose identities do not correspond to any of the initials in her portfolio, but who consider themselves friendly to the cause or causes and want to learn more about how to help.

That effort, which as with the center’s other projects comes out of a discretionary budget of $70,000 this year (up from $40,500 the year before Mr. Clementi died), seems to be wildly successful. In addition to those oversubscribed training programs, she said she could not even print up “ally” lapel pins fast enough; as soon as she sets out a thousand, people snatch them up and ask for more.

But beyond gay and transgender students themselves, and the concentric circle of those who actively position themselves as allies, it is not clear how far the center’s message has gotten. Ms. Kurtz said she had yet to meet anyone who was less than supportive.

But Rutgers is, after all, a university of 59,000 students across several campuses.

Stefan Koekemoer, a medieval studies major who graduated last year, said he heard numerous homophobic slurs over the years. “I almost followed these two dudes because they were snickering and pointing” at a gay friend, he said.

Mr. Koekemoer, who is heterosexual, said he himself was sometimes called an antigay slur, even during classes.

Robert S. Goopio, the president of Rutgers’s chapter of Delta Lambda Phi, a predominantly gay fraternity, said “the culture might have been different a few years ago.” Since Mr. Clementi’s death, he speculated, “a lot of people who might be homophobic probably won’t say so because of the consequences they can see can happen.”

Some of that change may also reflect events that have occurred in a remarkable span in the history of American sexuality. Two years ago, President Obama had not yet endorsed same-sex marriage and New York State had not yet legalized it (New Jersey still has civil unions). The military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy had not yet been repealed, and the Army had not yet promoted an openly lesbian general.

And Dharun Ravi, the student who spied on Mr. Clementi, had not been convicted of invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, though his 30-day jail sentence was criticized by some gay-rights advocates as too lenient.

In just that short span, being a gay college student may have come to mean something slightly, but crucially, different than it did when Mr. Clementi arrived on campus.

“I’m from South Jersey, and it’s a rather homophobic area,” said Andrew Massaro, a junior and a Delta Lambda Phi brother. “But when I got here I realized word is spreading, and it’s spreading fast.”

The result is a university where, some students say, the presence of highly visible gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students has become just a basic and unexceptional part of campus life.

Rainbow Perspectives includes not just students who, because of their sexual or gender identity, felt out of place in a traditional dorm. It also includes heterosexual students who like the company.

So Jeff Thomas, a junior, lives there with his girlfriend — which would be against the rules in a traditional dormitory, where students can room only with those of the same legal gender. And Nick Margolies, now a sophomore, lives there with a male roommate — which also would be against the rules for the same reason. Delta Lambda Phi now has both its first transgender member and its first straight member.

Leonard Haas, a fellow fraternity member, said he once heard a homophobic taunt at Rutgers as he walked down the street holding another man’s hand. But because Mr. Haas felt so comfortable as a gay man at Rutgers, and because that stray comment was so much at odds with the warm reception he had otherwise received, he shrugged it off.

“I’m happy,” he said, “I’m in a good place, it doesn’t matter.”

    Since Suicide, More Resources for Transgender and Gay Students, NYT, 21.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/nyregion/
    after-clementis-suicide-rutgers-embraces-its-gay-and-transgender-students.html

Woman Becomes First Openly Gay General

August 12, 2012
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — An Army officer being promoted to brigadier general openly acknowledged her homosexuality on Friday by having her wife pin her star to her uniform, thus becoming the first openly gay officer of flag rank in the United States military.

The officer, Brig. Gen. Tammy S. Smith, 49, a 26-year veteran of the Army, was promoted in a ceremony at the women’s memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The star was affixed by Tracey Hepner, who was a co-founder last year of the Military Partners and Families Coalition, which “provides support, resources, education and advocacy for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender military partners and their families,” according to its Web site.

The couple married in March 2011 in the District of Columbia.

The military dropped its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay service members on Sept. 20, 2011, after a change in federal law.

The Army said that General Smith was not available for an interview on Sunday. However, she said in a statement that the Defense Department had made sexual orientation a private matter, but that “participating with family in traditional ceremonies such as the promotion is both common and expected of a leader.”

Sue Fulton, a spokeswoman for OutServe, a two-year-old organization of lesbians and gay men in the military, said Sunday that it was “highly unlikely” that General Smith was the only gay officer of her rank. She called General Smith’s public acknowledgment significant.

“I would say that it’s important to recognize ‘the first,’ because then the next person doesn’t have to be first,” said Ms. Fulton, a 1980 West Point graduate. “Once we get over each ‘first,’ each hurdle of ‘Well, that’s never been done before,’ it makes it a nonissue going forward.”

Ms. Fulton, who was honorably discharged as a captain in 1986, said she left the Army because of the strains of maintaining a secret lesbian relationship. She called the promotion ceremony in which General Smith acknowledged being gay part of the best in Army tradition. Ms. Fulton quoted a speech last September in which the Army chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, said that “the strength of our Army is our soldiers; the strength of our soldiers is our families.”

Ms. Fulton said she had no doubt that General Smith’s superiors knew of her sexual orientation when they selected her for promotion.

As a colonel, General Smith was deployed in Afghanistan from December 2010 to October 2011 as the chief of Army Reserve Affairs. She currently serves in Washington as the deputy chief of the Army Reserve.

    Woman Becomes First Openly Gay General, NYT, 12.8.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/us/army-woman-is-first-openly-gay-officer-promoted-to-flag-rank.html

A Family With Two Moms, Except in the Eyes of the Law

July 20, 2012
The New York Times
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD

Same-sex couples raising children must stand ready to prove to the world they are a family, just one that happens to have two mothers or two fathers.

This constant burden of proof is especially difficult for families like the Muzingos, who live in a state that doesn’t allow them to establish legal ties to each other. Michelle Muzingo was in the delivery room when her wife, Katrina, gave birth to each of their three children, who are now 7, 4 and 1. She cut their umbilical cords and was the first to hold the children, who call her “mommy.” Yet because they live in Ohio, a state that does not allow gay couples to adopt, she is unable to make that title official.

“We are always scanning the circle around us to see what we need to put in place to protect ourselves,” said Katrina, 37.

A report released earlier this week illustrates just how vulnerable these couples and their children are, both legally and financially. After all, 30 states do not have laws that allow same-sex parents to both adopt, while six states restrict them or impose outright bans.

Even families who live in states that recognize their relationships can run into trouble if they travel or move. And if something were to happen to a parent who was unable to adopt or otherwise establish legal ties, the child might be denied certain federal benefits — something that children of most heterosexual parents receive automatically.

“Outdated state laws really place children being raised by lesbian and gay families at risk, whether they do so intentionally through antigay legislation or whether they do so unintentionally because they haven’t updated their laws to reflect modern and contemporary family structures,” said Laura Deaton, policy research director of Movement Advancement Project, which wrote the report with two other research and advocacy groups, the Family Equality Council and the Center for American Progress.

The Muzingos, who live in Brunswick Hills, Ohio, but married in Canada in 2005, know their children would be unable to collect Social Security death or disability benefits on Michelle’s work record.

“We have way more life insurance than probably a typical middle-class family,” said Katrina. “If something were to happen to Michelle, the sole breadwinner, we would have zero rights to her Social Security, to her pension, to anything.”

They have to deal with smaller inconveniences, too. When the couple went to sign up their son Carter for kindergarten, they had to get a notarized letter stating that he lived in the family’s home in the school district because the home was in Michelle’s name only (Michelle, 42, said she was unable to easily add Katrina to the title at closing because their marriage wasn’t recognized and Katrina wasn’t on the mortgage).

Michelle’s guardianship papers, which they drafted shortly after Katrina became pregnant for the first time, weren’t enough. And as the couple has learned, those papers — along with the powers of attorney, health care proxies and wills, which together cost $2,000 — don’t guarantee that they’ll be recognized as a family.

The same goes for many of the estimated two million or more children being raised by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender parents who are unable to formalize relationships with both of their parents, according to the report.

These families bear a variety of financial, legal and emotional costs. A child may be unable to receive insurance through the employer of a nonbiological parent, for instance, a particularly big burden if that parent is the sole breadwinner. (Even if the parent’s employer does provide coverage, the family may owe extra taxes on the value of that insurance, unlike their heterosexual married peers with children.)

The same parent may not have the authority to make routine or emergency medical decisions for the child, or even sign a school permission slip. And in the event of a breakup, both parent and child could be hurt: the child may be denied financial support from a parent, or the parent may be denied visitation rights.

“When both parents have legal ties to their children, family court can award custody and visitation to the most suitable parent or jointly to both parents based on the interest of the child,” the report said, “as opposed to having to exclude one parent from consideration.”

The inequities don’t end there. If the biological or legal parent were to die or become disabled, the child could be placed with a distant relative or in foster care instead of staying with the nonlegal parent. Having a legal relationship also provides children with the right to sue over a parent’s wrongful death, and it usually gives them the right to inherit from a parent who dies without a will.

So many families go to great lengths to establish strong legal relationships where they can. Take, for instance, a lesbian couple with one spouse who is pregnant. The report said that, with the exception of Iowa, all states that recognized their union would allow the second mother to be listed on the child’s birth certificate because the state’s statutes recognized her as the “presumed parent.” This is an easy and free way to establish legal ties.

But some lawyers still advise the nonbiological parent to go through the adoption process anyway. Why bother adopting your own child? If the family moves or travels to a less friendly state, that state generally must honor another state’s court judgments — but it is not obliged to honor birth certificates or relationships borne from a state statute. Adoption also creates an independent legal tie between parent and child, the report said, regardless of the parents’ relationship.

And adoption is easy for most people to understand. “Most schools, churches, summer camps and doctors understand adoption and adoption judgments,” Ms. Deaton added.

The road to adoption, however, can be more arduous and costly for same-sex couples, depending on where they live. Fifteen states plus the District of Columbia recognize same-sex unions — whether through marriage or a domestic partnership — and permit the couples to adopt jointly. An individual who is married to a child’s parent can usually adopt through a relatively streamlined and simple process known as stepparent adoption.

Five additional states — Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Montana and Pennsylvania — allow second-parent adoptions. This allows the partner of a legal parent to adopt even if the adults aren’t considered married, though they usually have to clear more hurdles.

In Colorado, second-parent adoptions require a background check, fingerprints and a home study, under which a social worker evaluates the home and adoptive parent. The cost can run $800 to $2,000, according to Erica Johnson, an estate planning lawyer with Ambler & Keenan in Denver. If the couple decides to hire a lawyer, they have to pay $1,400 to $2,000 more, she said, while stepparent adoptions are much easier.

“If they were able to get married, they don’t have any of that intrusiveness,” said Ms. Johnson, adding that the process can take months.

Beth Moloney, who lives with her wife, Barbara, in Providence, R.I., gave birth to a daughter last September. And even though the couple was married in Massachusetts in 2010 and their state recognizes civil unions, they were unable to list Barbara as a parent on their daughter’s birth certificate.

So Barbara pursued a second-parent adoption, which she completed earlier this year. “It’s like a bad movie in a lot of ways,” Ms. Moloney said. “Barbara was there when she was conceived, when she was born, was the first to hold her, and she swaddled better than I did. And here’s the state saying you’re not a parent.”

Since Barbara had to live with the baby for at least six months before the adoption could be completed, Beth said they were afraid to visit friends out of state until everything could be fully documented. “I understand in a regular adoption why these things are important,” Ms. Moloney said. “But this is not a regular adoption. There is no third person we are taking out of the picture. There is just us.” And while some states offer new types of protections, the lack of consistency across the country — depending on which courthouse you visit, or even within states that have policies — means many children are left with legal ties to only one parent.

Repealing the law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman — part of the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA — wouldn’t solve these issues either. It would help children become eligible for certain federal benefits in states that allow same-sex couples to marry, and it would help families qualify for child-related tax deductions and credits. But it wouldn’t oblige states to perform second-parent adoptions, for instance.

Ms. Moloney said she hoped that by the time her daughter grew up, these obstacles would be gone. “When I sit here and look at my daughter, I think, by the time you are a young adult and you are out in the world, I hope that you will be telling your friends, ‘Oh, my parents had to do this. Isn’t that silly?’ ”

“I hope so,” she added. “I really do.”

    A Family With Two Moms, Except in the Eyes of the Law, NYT, 20.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/your-money/
    same-sex-couples-often-face-obstacles-in-establishing-legal-ties-to-children.html

Black Leaders and Gay Advocates March in Step

June 9, 2012
The New York Times
By KATE TAYLOR

For years, gay rights organizations and major civil rights organizations viewed each other warily. African-American leaders often saw the gay rights groups as insensitive to racial concerns, and some resented the movement’s use of civil rights language to make the case for same-sex marriage. Advocates for gay rights, in turn, sometimes blamed socially conservative African-Americans for their defeat in crucial electoral battles.

But since the relationship reached something of a crisis with the passage of Proposition 8, California’s ballot initiative against same-sex marriage, in 2008, leaders in both movements have made an effort to bring their groups closer together.

Now, conversations among leaders in the gay, black and Latino communities have borne significant fruit: On May 19, the board of the N.A.A.C.P. voted to endorse same-sex marriage.

And then, last Tuesday, representatives of several national gay rights organizations gathered at New York City’s Stonewall Inn, often described as the birthplace of their movement, to announce that they would march to protest the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practice, under which the police each year have been stopping hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, most of them black or Latino, in an effort to prevent crime.

Some of the gay rights leaders specifically cited support from the N.A.A.C.P. for same-sex marriage as a reason they decided to oppose the stop-and-frisk policy.

“We need to find ways to strengthen our alliances and really strengthen our commitment to one another,” said Jeffrey Campagna, a national gay rights organizer who is coordinating the involvement of gay rights groups in the march on June 17 against the stop-and-frisk practice.

Julian Bond, a former chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. and a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said he saw the association’s support for same-sex marriage as a way to acknowledge the contributions of gay rights advocates — most had not come out publicly at the time — in the civil rights movement.

“I knew these people, whom I just assumed to be gay, and I knew what they were doing on my behalf — and I hoped on their behalf, too,” he said. “I was grateful for it, and when the chance came, I wanted to pay them back.”

The same-sex-marriage and stop-and-frisk issues are only the most visible signs of closer collaboration.

Around the country, gay rights groups have joined minority advocacy organizations in political battles on behalf of voting rights and affirmative action. And in California, Oregon and Colorado, gay rights organizations have formed partnerships with immigrant rights groups to fight aggressive immigration laws.

And even before the national board of the N.A.A.C.P. voted to support same-sex marriage, that organization and other civil rights groups got involved in marriage battles on the state level. In North Carolina, the N.A.A.C.P. paid for radio and print advertisements, direct mail and “robocalls” urging black voters to oppose an amendment banning same-sex marriage; the amendment passed in May. In Maryland, where the State Legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriage in February, the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network and Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights were prominent supporters.

“You must be for the civil rights of everyone, or you’re not for the civil rights of anyone,” Mr. Sharpton said last week.

One indication of the new rapport: Chad Griffin, who is taking over on Monday as president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading gay rights group, plans to have lunch on one of his first days in Washington with the president of the N.A.A.C.P., Benjamin Todd Jealous.

Mr. Jealous explained the newfound collaboration with a reference to Bayard Rustin, the pacifist and civil rights advocate who was black and gay.

“In the last four years, with the increase in hate crimes across the country, with states attempting to encode discrimination into their state laws and constitutions,” Mr. Jealous said, “it’s become clear that, just as Bayard Rustin admonished us all, that we would either stand together or die apart.”

The distance that has long existed between the gay rights and civil rights movements has complex roots. In addition to the strain of social conservatism that pervades many black Protestant churches, gay rights advocates’ use of the phrase “civil rights” and comparisons of the two movements have sometimes offended African-Americans, according to Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University.

“When gay and lesbian people say, ‘Hey, we understand, because we’ve been oppressed, too’ and ‘Like black people, we...,’ that’s a nonstarter for many black people,” he said.

Keith Boykin, an author who has written about homosexuality in the black community, said that “when people hear civil rights and gay rights, they think that people are trying to equate the two movements.” As a result, he said, “we sometimes get caught up in these hierarchies of oppression.”

For its part, the gay rights movement has sometimes struggled to be racially inclusive.

“Fifteen years ago, the leadership of the gay community, certainly in terms of organizations, was overwhelmingly white gay men,” said Marjorie J. Hill, the chief executive of GMHC, an H.I.V./AIDS organization.

Dr. Hill, who is black, said the more diverse gay rights organizations became, the more natural it was for gay rights and civil rights groups to form alliances.

The communication between the two communities has picked up since the disclosure in March of a memorandum by the National Organization for Marriage, the leading group opposing same-sex marriage in the country, that described a goal to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks” over same-sex marriage.

Leaders in both movements had already perceived a need to create relationships after gay rights advocates and minorities found themselves pitted against each other in fights over same-sex marriage.

“In the aftermath of Proposition 8, it was all about ‘the blacks and the Latinos, they didn’t vote for us,’ ” said Andrea Guerrero, the executive director of Equality Alliance San Diego, a group that works with immigrants and minority communities.

“Similarly, in the immigrant community, there’s been a sense of ‘they only call on us when they need us for their issue — they never come and help us on our issues,’ ” she said.

To address that divide, she and Delores A. Jacobs, the chief executive officer of the San Diego LGBT Community Center, decided to test political messaging about nontraditional families and the need to keep families together that they hope could be used in future campaigns to advocate both immigrants’ rights and same-sex marriage.

After Oregon voters in 2004 approved an amendment banning same-sex marriage, with the major group supporting the amendment using an African-American talk show host as its spokeswoman, a gay rights organization called Basic Rights Oregon decided to review its own lack of diversity and its failure to form close relationships with minority communities, according to its executive director, Jeana Frazzini.

It deepened a relationship with a Latino immigrant rights group, Causa. Since then, Basic Rights Oregon has fought local anti-immigrant ballot measures and pushed at the state level for illegal immigrants to be able to get driver’s licenses and, for those who came to this country as children, to pay in-state tuition at public universities. Causa and Basic Rights Oregon have also joined forces to run an ad on Spanish-language radio to promote legalizing same-sex marriage.

In the ad, a woman describes how she and her husband struggled to accept their gay son, then says that she does not want him to face discrimination when he finds someone to marry.

“As a Latina, I believe in loving my neighbor, in treating others as we would like to be treated, and in never turning our backs on family,” the woman says. “Marriage has brought so much happiness to my life, and I wouldn’t want any member of anyone’s family — gay or straight — to be denied that chance at happiness.”

    Black Leaders and Gay Advocates March in Step, NYT, 9.6.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/nyregion/black-leaders-and-gay-advocates-find-ways-to-march-in-step.html

Appeals Court Turns Back Marriage Act as Unfair to Gays

May 31, 2012
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and ETHAN BRONNER

A federal appeals court ruled unanimously Thursday that the federal law declaring marriage to be a union solely between a man and a woman discriminates against married same-sex couples by denying them the same benefits afforded to heterosexual couples — a ruling that could set the stage for the Supreme Court to review the issue as early as next year.

The decision, from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, will have no immediate effect because the court stayed its ruling in anticipation of an appeal to the Supreme Court. Legal experts said the justices could agree as early as this fall to hear the case and arguments could come next spring, making it the first case involving the same-sex marriage law to be decided by the court.

While the case dealt narrowly with the question of federal benefits for same-sex couples — not with the legality of same-sex marriage itself — many scholars said it was a significant moment in civil rights.

“It is another illustration of the growing consensus of the judiciary about the unconstitutionality of discriminating against gays and lesbians in the realm of marriage,” said Geoffrey Stone, a professor of law at the University of Chicago.

Another case, from California, does test the broader constitutionality of same-sex marriage, and as it has percolated through the courts, some proponents have said they preferred that it be in the vanguard. But others have felt that the incremental approach used in the Massachusetts case — much like the one used by opponents of abortion rights — would be more effective in achieving the movement’s ultimate goals of full equality for gay and lesbian couples.

“I think this road for the Supreme Court has more upside and less risk for gay rights folks and for the court to intervene in this type of issue,” said Douglas NeJaime of Loyola Law School. “It is more limited with no fundamental right-to-marry question.”

Thursday’s ruling, by a three-judge panel, was the first time an appellate court had declared a section of the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, unconstitutional, although two federal judges in California have done the same. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is due to hear arguments there on the issue in several months.

Judge Michael Boudin of the Boston appellate court, who was appointed by the elder President George Bush, wrote in Thursday’s decision of a concern over Congress’s “effort to put a thumb on the scales and influence a state’s decision as to how to shape its own marriage laws.”

He concluded that “only the Supreme Court can finally decide this unique case.”

Mary L. Bonauto, who argued the case for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, told reporters on a conference call, “We think today is a great day and look forward to the next round.”

The court upheld a ruling from 2010 in which Judge Joseph L. Tauro of United States District Court in Boston found that the marriage law violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution by denying benefits to one class of married couples — gay men and lesbians — but not to others. The benefits, now granted only to heterosexual couples, range from the ability to file joint tax returns, which can reduce liability, to the ability to collect Social Security survivors’ benefits.

Supporters of the law said they hoped the Supreme Court would reverse the appellate court’s decision.“Society should protect and strengthen marriage, not undermine it,” said Dale Schowengerdt, counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a group of Christian lawyers.

“In allowing one state to hold the federal government, and potentially other states, hostage to redefine marriage, the First Circuit attempts a bridge too far,” he said in a statement. “Under this rationale, if just one state decided to accept polygamy, the federal government and perhaps other states would be forced to accept it, too.”

The court did not address — nor was it asked to — whether states without same-sex marriage could be forced to recognize couples who were married in states where it is legal. The First Circuit covers Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico.

Supporters of the marriage law also seemed to believe that the Massachusetts case was better for their cause than the one from California, in which the Ninth Circuit earlier this year struck down a ban on same-sex marriage.

“This is a good development for defenders of the law,” said Gregory Katsas, a former Justice Department official who has defended the Defense of Marriage Act. For the Supreme Court to overturn it, he said, the justices would have to take the drastic step of striking down “a federal statute passed by overwhelming margins and signed by Bill Clinton.”

Watchers of the Supreme Court believe that the nine justices are divided 4 to 4 on the question of gay rights, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy likely to be the deciding vote.

Justice Kennedy has written two previous decisions that significantly advanced gay rights, and the consensus in the legal community is that he will probably be supportive in this case if the justices agree to take it.

The Massachusetts decision relied heavily on his two rulings and seemed to some experts a clear attempt to appeal to him on his own terms.

“I could see Kennedy taking this one because it will allow him to write a narrower decision rather than a more sweeping defense of gay rights,” said Mr. NeJaime of Loyola. He and others said that the justices do not like to get too far ahead of society on such questions.

The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996 and signed into law by Mr. Clinton. It stemmed from a fear in Congress in the early 1990s that Hawaii might allow same-sex marriage.

In a sign of how rapidly society has changed, President Obama campaigned against the law in 2008, said in 2011 that his administration would not defend it, and last month declared publicly that he supported the right of same-sex couples to marry.

That left the defense of the law somewhat orphaned, until the Republican majority in the House appointed a group called the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group to defend it. The group has argued that Congress wanted to preserve the law because it provided a traditional and uniform definition of marriage, helping the government to distribute benefits.

But Jennifer C. Pizer, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who focuses on sexual orientation law, said that the ruling Thursday meant that holding a traditional view of marriage does not allow someone to discriminate against gay couples.

“Many people of good will have grown up with the belief that homosexuality is dangerous,” she said. “The court is saying that the fact that certain congressmen and justices may have a fondness for the 1950s doesn’t change the fact that under the rule of law everyone has to be treated equally.”

    Appeals Court Turns Back Marriage Act as Unfair to Gays, NYT, 31.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/us/appeals-court-rules-against-federal-marriage-act.html

A Way Out of the Same-Sex Marriage Mess

May 23, 2012
The New York Times
By MAE KUYKENDALL

East Lansing, Mich.

THE debate over same-sex marriage in the United States has become a battle between two totally opposing visions. Proponents of gay equality want the Supreme Court to proclaim same-sex marriage a fundamental right of citizens, which the court, given its conservative bent, seems unlikely to do. Opponents dream of a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex unions, which also seems improbable, given rapidly evolving attitudes toward homosexuality.

President Obama has stepped into the breach, but the nuance of his recent announcement — affirming the ideal of equality while also expressing deference to state prerogative over marriage law — has not simplified matters. The contradiction in his remarks seems impossible to reconcile.

But there is a way. The Supreme Court, which will almost certainly have to take up the issue, should hold that while states may refuse to authorize same-sex marriages, they may not void — that is, refuse to recognize — gay marriages lawfully conducted in other states.

Yes, such a ruling would effectively make same-sex marriage legal throughout the country, because it would require Texas to recognize same-sex unions performed in Massachusetts. It would no doubt infuriate opponents.

But it would also be the best judicial solution. It would recognize the Supreme Court’s limited authority over marriage laws and leave it to state courts to resolve differences across states in areas like divorce, child custody and inheritance, as they have traditionally done.

It would allow the Supreme Court to manage, rather than impede, an inexorable process of social change. It would acknowledge that the unequal patchwork of state marriage laws cannot be sustained long-term. (Six states and the District of Columbia permit same-sex marriage; 30 states have constitutional amendments prohibiting it.)

Sooner or later, the Supreme Court will have to confront the problem; challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 statute that forbade federal recognition of same-sex marriage, and Proposition 8, the 2008 ban on same-sex marriage in California, are already making their way through the federal courts.

Some observers expect the court to dodge the issue. They assume that the best that can be hoped for is a long period of legal skirmishes that will gradually chip away at states’ denial of the rights and privileges of gay couples who marry where it is legal to do so. But a protracted and agonizing battle would not be good for anyone.

I happen to believe that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. But I also believe that the court isn’t ready to go that far. Directly mandating that states rewrite their laws to allow same-sex marriages (and that county clerks issue marriage licenses to gay couples) would risk the kind of backlash that followed court-ordered school desegregation in the 1950s.

In contrast, a more limited ruling that forbade states from voiding other states’ marriages would recognize equality as a fundamental norm of citizenship while also speaking to values, like fairness and neighborliness, that are often obscured by anti-marriage ballot initiatives. An example of this can be found in Wyoming, where Republican legislators defeated a bill last year that would have prohibited recognition of out-of-state marriages. (Wyoming is one of 10 states that do not issue same-sex marriage licenses but also do not have constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.)

Even dire opponents of same-sex marriage can appreciate the injustice of stripping away liberties granted by other states. Voiding some marriages, but not others, is so powerful an expression of inequality and disrespect for interstate reciprocity that it requires a stronger justification than anti-gay animus.

Currently, many states use principles that originated in international law to argue that they do not have to respect same-sex marriages performed in their sister states. The idea is that sovereign countries can withhold comity, or legal reciprocity, if there is a basis in policy for doing so; the United States need not recognize polygamous marriages or unions involving a child bride, for example, because those unions are widely seen as harmful to vulnerable parties.

But this analogy does not carry over to the states. Florida might argue that New York’s recognition of same-sex marriages is antithetical to Floridian culture and values, but that is out of sync with constitutional norms of federalism and equality, at a time when same-sex marriages, civil unions and domestic partnerships have become common.

(I even believe that states should have to recognize so-called evasive marriages — in which couples travel out of state to marry, and then return home — though the legal scholar Steve Sanders, who has advanced an argument similar to mine, does not go that far.)

Mr. Obama was right both to embrace equality as a principle and to respect the process by which the understanding of marriage gradually evolves to include same-sex couples, within the premises of federalism. What is needed now is a similarly coherent and sound ruling by the Supreme Court.

The Constitution allows for creative solutions to seemingly intractable conflicts. The justices should neither mandate state marriage law nor tolerate the arbitrary use of state power to void a critical legal status awarded to more and more American couples.

 

Mae Kuykendall is a professor of law at Michigan State University

and the director of the Legal E-Marriage Project.

    A Way Out of the Same-Sex Marriage Mess, NYT, 23.5.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/opinion/a-way-out-of-the-same-sex-marriage-mess.html

Rutgers Webcam-Spying Defendant

Is Sentenced to 30-Day Jail Term

May 21, 2012
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A judge here sentenced Dharun Ravi to 30 days in jail on Monday for using a webcam to spy on his roommate having sex with a man, a punishment that angered prosecutors and did little to quiet the debate over using laws against hate crimes to fight antigay bias.

His roommate, Tyler Clementi, killed himself in September 2010, two days after discovering that Mr. Ravi had spied on him in their room at Rutgers University, galvanizing national concern about suicide among gay teenagers.

Mr. Ravi had faced up to 10 years in prison after a jury convicted him of all 15 counts against him, which included bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and tampering with a witness and evidence.

Prosecutors vowed to appeal, and the sentence surprised even many who had called for leniency, as it came after an extended scolding by Judge Glenn Berman in Superior Court in Middlesex County.

“I heard this jury say guilty 288 times — 24 questions, 12 jurors, that’s the multiplication,” the judge told Mr. Ravi, recalling the questionnaire jurors filled out in arriving at the verdict. “And I haven’t heard you apologize once.”

“I do not believe he hated Tyler Clementi,” the judge told a courtroom packed on one side with supporters of Mr. Ravi and on the other with those of the Clementi family. “I do believe he acted out of colossal insensitivity.”

Prosecutors and Mr. Clementi’s family, who had addressed reporters with relief bordering on buoyancy following the verdict two months ago, canceled a news conference planned for after the sentencing. Mr. Ravi’s family collapsed into an embrace with his lawyers. Just moments earlier, his mother, Sabitha Ravi, had sobbed while imploring the judge to spare her son prison time.

“The media misconstrued the facts to the public and misconceptions were formed,” she said, telling how she watched helplessly as her son sank into despair after he was charged and dropped out of Rutgers, barely eating or leaving the house. “All I could do was hug him and cry.”

At her tears, Mr. Ravi himself broke down crying, the first time since the beginning of the trial that he had publicly shown more than a glimpse of emotion.

Mr. Ravi, 20, was not charged with causing Mr. Clementi’s death, but the suicide hung heavily over the trial, and over the sentencing on Monday. Mr. Clementi’s mother, father and brother spoke before the judge delivered his decision, breaking down occasionally as they recalled his accomplishment and his promise, and the pain of losing him and of reliving the agony of his final days as they endured three weeks of courtroom testimony.

“I cannot imagine the level of rejection, isolation and disdain he must have felt from his peers,” Tyler’s brother James Clementi said. “Dharun never bothered to care about the harm he was doing to my brother’s heart and mind. My family has never heard an apology, an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing.”

His mother, Jane Clementi, also criticized students who knew about the spying from Mr. Ravi’s Twitter feeds. “How could they all go along with such meanness?” she said. “Why didn’t any one of them speak up and try to stop it?”

Judge Berman said he wanted to impose a sentence that was “constructive” and would provide a measure of closure — “though I don’t know how the Clementis will ever get closure,” he said. He said he imposed the jail time for witness and evidence tampering and for lying to the police. But for the bias intimidation convictions, he gave Mr. Ravi three years’ probation.

The judge did not explicitly say why he deviated so far from the maximum sentence. But he said he believed the State Legislature had intended prison time to be attached to crimes of violence, and there had been none.

Mr. Ravi’s lead lawyer, Steven Altman, had earlier read from a presentencing memo by a corrections officer who had interviewed Mr. Ravi and recommended against incarceration.

Mr. Ravi, who came to this country from India as a child, remains a felon and could face deportation. But the judge said he would recommend against that.

Gillian M. Christensen, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency was “in the process of reviewing documents relating to the conviction and sentencing” of Mr. Ravi, but would not comment further.

Some immigration lawyers pointed on Monday to a clause declaring that a legal resident, or green card holder, like Mr. Ravi can be deported if convicted of two or more crimes involving “moral turpitude,” as long as neither crime arose out of a single scheme.

Thomas E. Moseley, an immigration lawyer based in Newark, said that if the immigration authorities “wanted to be really aggressive,” they might argue that the tampering crime was separate from the bias crime.

Judge Berman also sentenced Mr. Ravi to 300 hours of community service, counseling about cyberbullying and what he called “alternate lifestyles,” and approximately $11,000 in fees. Most of the money is to be used to help victims of bias crimes.

Mr. Clementi, an 18-year-old who had recently come out to his parents, and Mr. Ravi were three weeks into their freshman year at Rutgers when Mr. Clementi asked if he could have the room for the evening so he could be alone with a man, whom he had met on a Web site for gay men.

In court, prosecutors presented a long trail of electronic evidence to show how Mr. Ravi had set up a webcam to spy on the men, then gone into a friend’s room and watched. He caught only a glimpse of Mr. Clementi and his visitor in an embrace, then sent out Twitter messages announcing that he had seen his roommate “making out with a dude.” He set up the camera again two days later and urged others to watch. But by then, Mr. Clementi had seen the Twitter posts and turned off the webcam.

Mr. Clementi, an accomplished violinist from Ridgewood, N.J., checked Mr. Ravi’s Twitter feed 38 times and filed a request for a room change — and then jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. In court on Monday, his mother said she feared Mr. Ravi’s Twitter posts were the last thing her son saw before he jumped.

Many gay rights advocates had hailed the jury’s verdict as a bold strike against bias, a message that bullying of gay men and lesbians should not be dismissed as a mere prank.

But other prominent gay commentators argued that while what Mr. Ravi did was repugnant, it was not the kind of sustained or aggressive behavior that constitutes bullying.

The sentence similarly divided them.

Steven Goldstein, the chairman of Garden State Equality, a New Jersey gay rights group that pushed for the state to pass its strict antibullying statutes after Mr. Clementi’s death, said the sentence was lighter than what many shoplifters received.

“We have opposed throwing the book at Dharun Ravi,” Mr. Goldstein said in a statement. “But we have similarly rejected the other extreme, that Ravi should have gotten no jail time at all, and today’s sentencing is closer to that extreme than the other.”

William Dobbs, who had attended rallies supporting Mr. Ravi, said the judge was reflecting the discomfort many gay rights campaigners expressed at the use of hate crimes to prosecute Mr. Ravi.

“The judge had to control a backlash to an out-of-control prosecution,” he said. “The number of charges, the severity and the potential penalties, even the amount of resources devoted to this trial, was out of all proportion to the incident.”

Bruce J. Kaplan, the Middlesex County prosecutor, issued a statement after the sentencing, saying that while his office had not requested the maximum prison term, “it was expected that his conviction on multiple offenses of invading the privacy of two victims on two separate occasions, four counts of bias intimidation against Tyler Clementi, and the cover-up of those crimes would warrant more than a 30-day jail term.”

Still, even some jurors continued to struggle over the appropriate sentence. One, Susan Matiejunas, said she had watched the proceedings on television all morning and was surprised.

“Thirty days is a slap on the wrist,” she said. “Six months to a year would have been more suitable, since we convicted him on so many counts.”

Ms. Matiejunas telephoned later to say she had reconsidered.

“The kid has spent two years in purgatory just waiting for all of this to end,” she said. “I think probably 30 days really is quite enough on top of all that.”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting from New Brunswick, and Hannah Miet and Kirk Semple from New York.

   
    Rutgers Webcam-Spying Defendant Is Sentenced to 30-Day Jail Term, NYT, 21.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/nyregion/rutgers-spying-defendant-sentenced-to-30-days-in-jail.html

Colorado Rejects Same-Sex Civil Unions

May 14, 2012
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

DENVER — A bill that would have allowed civil unions for same-sex couples in Colorado was defeated on Monday night during a special legislative session called by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper to debate the issue.

The legislation was voted down by Republican lawmakers on a 5-to-4 vote along party lines after more than two hours of emotional testimony in the State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, where it was assigned Monday by Republican leadership in the House of Representatives.

“We saw this bill die even though a majority of members of the Senate and a majority of members of the House and the governor, as well as a vast majority of Coloradans, want to see this become law,” said Representative Mark Ferrandino of Denver, one of four openly gay state legislators and a sponsor of the bill. “It is very unfortunate. Families across Colorado are going to have to wait longer for equal rights in our state.”

Supporters had come tantalizingly close to passing the legislation this year after several Republicans decided to break party ranks and back it.

The bill had cleared a number of committees and the full State Senate, but lawmakers reached an impasse last week and the bill was never brought to the House floor for a full vote before the legislative session concluded.

Supporters accused Republicans of stalling to prevent debate on the bill, while Republicans argued that Democrats had waited until the end of the session before pushing the bill through to force a political showdown.

The stalemate, which also resulted in dozens of other bills being left on the calendar, prompted the call for a special session by Mr. Hickenlooper, who described civil unions as “a fundamental question of fairness and civil rights” in a letter to legislators.

But if the special session breathed fresh life back into the legislation, it was short-lived.

On Monday, despite the urgings of civil-union supporters who rallied at the Capitol in Denver, the House speaker, Frank McNulty, a Republican from Highlands Ranch, assigned the bill to the state affairs committee, which was dominated by opponents of the legislation.

In a statement, Mr. McNulty accused Mr. Hickenlooper and Democrats of “pushing a last-minute, divisive attack on our traditional views on marriage” for their short-term political gain.

In voting against the bill, Representative Don Coram, a Republican from Montrose, said he was especially torn, because he has a gay son. “This is a situation that is very close to my heart,” he said. “But it’s very difficult because I also represent 75,000 people in southwest Colorado. What you are asking me to do here is to invalidate the vote of six years ago.”

Mr. Coram was referring to a 2006 amendment approved by the state’s voters that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman.

The debate over civil unions in Colorado comes as North Carolina voters last Tuesday approved an amendment that would ban same-sex marriages, partnerships and civil unions. The next day, President Obama said that he now supported same-sex marriage.

    Colorado Rejects Same-Sex Civil Unions, NYT, 14.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/us/colorado-rejects-same-sex-civil-unions.html

After Obama’s Decision on Marriage, a Call to Pastors

May 13, 2012
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON — About two hours after declaring his support for same-sex marriage last week, President Obama gathered eight or so African-American ministers on a conference call to explain himself. He had struggled with the decision, he said, but had come to believe it was the right one.

The ministers, though, were not all as enthusiastic. A vocal few made it clear that the president’s stand on gay marriage might make it difficult for them to support his re-election.

“They were wrestling with their ability to get over his theological position,” said the Rev. Delman Coates, the pastor of Mt. Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton, Md., who was on the call.

In the end, Mr. Coates, who supports civil marriages for gay men and lesbians, said that most of the pastors, regardless of their views on this issue, agreed to “work aggressively” on behalf of the president’s campaign. But not everyone. “Gay marriage is contrary to their understanding of Scripture,” Mr. Coates said. “There are people who are really wrestling with this.”

In the hours following Mr. Obama’s politically charged announcement on Wednesday, the president and his team embarked on a quiet campaign to contain the possible damage among religious leaders and voters. He also reached out to one or more of the five spiritual leaders he calls regularly for religious guidance, and his aides contacted other religious figures who have been supportive in the past.

The damage-control effort underscored the anxiety among Mr. Obama’s advisers about the consequences of the president’s revised position just months before what is expected to be a tight re-election vote. While hailed by liberals and gay-rights leaders for making a historic breakthrough, Mr. Obama recognized that much of the country is uncomfortable with or opposed to same-sex marriage, including many in his own political coalition.

The issue of religious freedom has become a delicate one for Mr. Obama, especially after the recent furor over an administration mandate that religiously affiliated organizations offer health insurance covering contraceptives. After complaints from Catholic leaders that the mandate undercut their faith, Mr. Obama offered a compromise that would maintain coverage for contraception while not requiring religious organizations to pay for it, but critics remained dissatisfied.

In taking on same-sex marriage, Mr. Obama made a point of couching his views in religious terms. “We’re both practicing Christians,” the president said of his wife and himself in the ABC News interview in which he discussed his new views. “And obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others.”

He added that what he thought about was “not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf but it’s also the golden rule, you know? Treat others the way you would want to be treated.”

After the interview, Mr. Obama hit the phones. Among those he called was one of the religious leaders he considers a touchstone, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the pastor of a conservative megachurch in Florida.

“Some of the faith communities are going to be afraid that this is an attack against religious liberty,” Mr. Hunter remembered telling the president.

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Obama insisted. “That’s not where we’re going, and that’s not what I want.”

Even some of Mr. Obama’s friends in the religious community warned that he risked alienating followers, particularly African-Americans who have been more skeptical of the idea than other Democratic constituencies.

The Rev. Jim Wallis, another religious adviser to Mr. Obama and the president and chief executive of Sojourners, a left-leaning evangelical organization, said that he had fielded calls since the announcement from pastors across the country, including African-American and Hispanic ministers. Religious leaders, he said, are deeply divided, with some seeing it as the government forcing clergy to accept a definition of marriage that they consider anathema to their teachings.

Mr. Wallis said that it was clear to him that the president’s decision was a matter of personal conscience, not public policy. But he said that some religious leaders wanted to hear Mr. Obama say that explicitly. “We hope the president will reach out to people who disagree with him on this,” Mr. Wallis said. “The more conservative churches need to know, need to be reassured that their religious liberty is going to be respected here.”

Mr. Obama has reached out to Mr. Wallis, Mr. Hunter and three other ministers for telephone prayer sessions and discussions about the intersection of religion and public policy.

Mr. Wallis would not say whether he heard from Mr. Obama as Mr. Hunter did. The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, another of the five and the senior pastor of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, said he did not. “He doesn’t need to talk with me about that,” Mr. Caldwell said.

The other two pastors, Bishop T. D. Jakes, a nationally known preaching powerhouse who fills stadiums and draws 30,000 worshipers to his church in Dallas, and the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., did not respond to messages Friday.

Mr. Obama began reaching out within hours of his announcement on Wednesday. At 4:30 p.m., he convened the African-American ministers on the call.

“It was very clear to me that he had arrived at this conclusion after much reflection, introspection and dialogue with family and staff and close friends,” said Mr. Coates, who remains confident that the undecided pastors on the call will ultimately back the president in November. “There are more public policy issues that we agree upon than this issue of private morality in which there’s some difference.”

That is a calculation the White House is counting on. The president’s strategists hope that any loss of support among black and independent moderates will be more than made up by proponents of gay marriage. But Mr. Obama’s aides declined to comment and opted not to send anyone to the Sunday talk shows for fear of elevating it further.

Religious conservative leaders said the president’s decision changed the calculus of the election. “I think the president this past week took six or seven states he carried in 2008 and put them in play with this one ill-conceived position that he’s taken,” Gary Bauer, the former presidential candidate, said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” On the same program, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said, “I’ve gotten calls from pastors across the nation, white and black pastors, who have said, ‘You know what? I’m not sitting on the sidelines anymore.’ ”

Establishment Republicans, though, were eager to shift the subject. “For those people that this is their issue, they have a clear choice,” Reince Preibus, the party chairman, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But I happen to believe that, at the end of the day, however, this election is still going to be about the economy.”

Mr. Obama’s efforts to mollify religious leaders came after a tumultuous week as he lagged behind Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in advocating same-sex marriage. A senior administration official who asked not to be named said the White House contacted religious and Congressional leaders and Democratic candidates only after the president’s announcement.

Among those contacted was Cameron Strang, editor of Relevant magazine and a young evangelical leader, but he was on vacation. By contrast, the office of Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, said he had not heard from the president after publicly calling his decision “deeply saddening.”

Mr. Hunter’s cellphone buzzed shortly after the Wednesday interview. “I’m not at all surprised he didn’t call me before because I would have tried to talk him out of it,” Mr. Hunter said.

“My interpretation of Scriptures, I can’t arrive at the same conclusion,” he said. “He totally understood that. One of the reasons he called was to make sure our relationship would be fine, and of course it would be.”

    After Obama’s Decision on Marriage, a Call to Pastors, NYT, 13.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/us/politics/on-marriage-obama-tried-to-limit-risk.html

President Obama’s Moment

May 9, 2012
The New York Times

It has always taken strong national leadership to expand equal rights in this country, and it has long been obvious that marriage rights are no exception. President Obama offered some of that leadership on Wednesday. “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with ABC News that the White House arranged for the purpose of giving Mr. Obama a forum to say just that.

With those 10 words, Mr. Obama finally stopped temporizing and “evolving” his position on same-sex marriage and took the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time. His words will not end the bitter fight over marriage rights, which we fear will continue for years to come. But they were of great symbolic value, and perhaps more. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted, no expansion of rights embraced by a president has failed to become the law of the land.

This is a president and a White House that has not always been unwavering in taking positions of principle, including on this issue. Mr. Obama’s statement followed days of unseemly equivocation by the White House after Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. announced his support for same-sex marriage on Sunday. It also came one day after North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment forbidding same-sex marriage and civil unions, which threatens all unmarried couples, health coverage for their children and domestic violence laws.

Still, the contrast was sharp between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, who took a hard-line position on Wednesday against same-sex marriage and civil unions with similar rights. He has said he favors a national constitutional amendment enshrining this particular bigotry.

Mr. Obama consciously presented his change of position (he used to favor so-called civil unions but not marriage) as a personal journey. He said he thought about “members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together,” and about “those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage.”

That process will seem familiar to Americans of his and older generations who have reached the same place, or are still getting there. Polling shows that younger Americans have firmly supported same-sex marriage for some time. Mr. Obama said denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples “doesn’t make sense” to his daughters. “Frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective,” he said. But there remains strong opposition among some older Americans, particularly Christian evangelicals and African-Americans. The White House is hoping Mr. Obama can help soften opposition among black voters over time.

We have one major point of disagreement with Mr. Obama: his support for the concept of states deciding this issue on their own. That position effectively restricts the right to marry to the 20 states that have not adopted the kind of constitutional prohibitions North Carolina voters approved on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama should remember that, in 1967, the Supreme Court said no state could prohibit mixed-race marriages because “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man.’ ” Those rights are too precious and too fragile to be left up to the whim of states and the tearing winds of modern partisan politics.

A federal judge in California, supported by an appellate court panel, has ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the 14th Amendment right to equal protection. That decision will probably reach the Supreme Court, and, when it does, we expect Mr. Obama, if he is still president, will take the final step in his evolutionary process and direct the Justice Department to support that ruling and urge the court to uphold equality in every state.

    President Obama’s Moment, NYT, 9.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/president-obamas-moment.html

Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal

May 9, 2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Before President Obama left the White House on Tuesday morning to fly to an event in Albany, several aides intercepted him in the Oval Office. Within minutes it was decided: the president would endorse same-sex marriage on Wednesday, completing a wrenching personal transformation on the issue.

As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand by embracing the idea of same-sex unions in a Sunday talk show interview.

Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September. Yet many of the president’s allies believed he would not do so, trusting instead in his strong support from gay voters for having ended a ban on openly gay people in the military and disavowing a federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Such caution was understandable, the allies said, given the unpredictable fallout the president would face by taking a clear stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day, before what is likely to be a close election. Mr. Obama’s closest advisers say only the timing was in question. Mr. Biden’s unexpected remarks undoubtedly accelerated the timetable.

Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women. Certainly, they thought, he would be asked his position on same-sex marriage by one of the show’s hosts, who include Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters about Mr. Obama’s stance. After the Tuesday morning meeting, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, contacted ABC and offered a wide-ranging interview with the president for the following day.

And so it was that Mr. Obama on Wednesday afternoon sat down in the White House with ABC’s Robin Roberts and made news, after nearly two years of saying that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.”

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama said.

Long a proponent of civil unions, Mr. Obama said his views had changed in part because of prodding by friends who are gay and by conversations with his wife and daughters.

“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” Mr. Obama said. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs.”

Mr. Obama also invoked his Christian faith in explaining his decision.

“The thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the golden rule — you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated,” he said. “And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids, and that’s what motivates me as president.”

Reaction to Mr. Obama’s announcement was largely predictable — including immediate opposition from his presumptive Republican rival, Mitt Romney — yet people on both sides of the issue pointed to the historical significance of a president endorsing marriage between people of the same sex. It was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which the Obama administration last year decided not to enforce in the courts.

While Mr. Obama’s announcement was significant from a symbolic standpoint, more important as a practical matter were Mr. Obama’s decision not to enforce the marriage act and his successful push in 2010 to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that prohibited openly gay men and lesbians from serving in the military. For that reason, gay rights groups had been largely enthusiastic about his re-election campaign while being pragmatically resigned to his not publicly supporting same-sex marriage before the election.

Mr. Obama’s announcement has little substantive impact — as an aide said, “It’s not like we’re trying to pass legislation.”

But the political impact is a wild card, even Obama advisers acknowledged, and it came one day after voters in North Carolina — the site of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention — supported a ban on same-sex marriage. But while the president has now injected a volatile social issue into the campaign debate, both sides say the election still is all but certain to turn on the economy.

Public support for same-sex marriage is growing at a pace that surprises even pollsters as older generations of voters who tend to be strongly opposed are supplanted by younger ones who are just as strongly in favor. Same-sex couples are featured in some of the most popular shows on television.

Yet opponents include white working-class voters, among whom Mr. Obama has long had weak support, and many African-Americans, led by influential ministers in their churches, whose support is critical to Mr. Obama in swing states like Virginia and North Carolina. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, one of the first openly gay members of Congress, said he told the White House months ago that it should not worry about the politics.

“This country is moving, and what’s interesting is every time somebody does something that’s supportive of our rights, it turns out to be (a) popular and (b) not very controversial,” he said in a telephone interview.

Many Americans already assumed Mr. Obama supported same-sex marriage, Mr. Frank said, adding, “Politically, it’s kind of a nonevent.”

Obama strategists had rejected the idea of announcing the president’s support during a fund-raiser or at a speech to a gay rights group, because, as one Democrat close to the White House put it, that would “look like pandering.”

Then last Friday, Mr. Biden taped his interview for NBC’s “Meet the Press,” shown on Sunday morning. Afterward, Mr. Biden’s aides circulated a transcript around the West Wing, with the gay marriage remarks highlighted in yellow. A flurry of e-mails ensued about how Mr. Biden’s office should explain it once the interview was broadcast.

The news media attention escalated on Monday when Mr. Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, acknowledged in a television interview that he also supported same-sex marriage. Editorialists, columnists and bloggers criticized Mr. Obama as appearing calculating by his continued ambivalence.

An administration official, who like others did not want to be named discussing internal White House deliberations, said that until this week, the one certainty was for Mr. Obama to take his stand before September to avoid a convention fight. “It’s not helpful to go down there and have a big conflagration about including this in the platform,” the official said.

But several events loomed that would also force attention on the issue, leaving Mr. Obama vulnerable to continued criticism.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama is to visit the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney for a campaign fund-raiser expected to raise about $12 million, much of it from Hollywood people active in the gay rights cause.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to give the commencement address next week at Barnard College in New York City, where he will receive a medal along with Evan Wolfson, the founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a leading advocate for same-sex unions. Mr. Wolfson, who had written that he would “whisper in the president’s ear” to support same-sex marriage, said in an interview on Wednesday, “I’m going to shout, ‘Thank you!’ ”

Also on Monday, Mr. Obama is to speak at a campaign fund-raiser for gay rights supporters. And on June 6, he is to return to Los Angeles to speak at a gala benefiting the gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 10, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported

that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s office did not flag his comments

about gay marriage in a transcript of his “Meet the Press” remarks

that was circulated in the West Wing on Friday.

The comments were highlighted in yellow.

    Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal, NYT, 9.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/politics/obama-says-same-sex-marriage-should-be-legal.html

Obama Won’t Order Ban on Gay Bias by Employers

April 11, 2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama disappointed and vexed gay supporters on Wednesday with his decision, conveyed to activists by a senior adviser, not to sign an executive order banning discrimination by employers with federal contracts.

The executive order, which activists said had support from the Labor and Justice Departments, would have applied to gay, bisexual and transgender people working for or seeking employment from federal contractors. Current law does not protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and legislation to do so, which Mr. Obama endorses, lacks sufficient votes in Congress.

“While it is not our usual practice to discuss executive orders that may or may not be under consideration, we do not expect that an executive order on L.G.B.T. nondiscrimination for federal contractors will be issued at this time,” said an administration official who would speak about the controversy only if provided anonymity. “We support legislation that has been introduced and we will continue to work with Congressional sponsors to build support for it.”

That stance departs from the White House’s prominent “we can’t wait” campaign: Since last fall, Mr. Obama has signed executive orders on a variety of issues, arguing that “we can’t wait” for legislation that Republicans in Congress refuse to let pass.

By not acting on the employment nondiscrimination order, Mr. Obama has newly angered a gay constituency that has been a source of campaign cash and that had been willing to overlook his failure so far to endorse same-sex marriage, given his actions on its other priorities, like repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy against openly gay service members.

Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign and one of the gay-rights activists who attended a White House meeting on Wednesday called by Valerie Jarrett, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, said afterward: “We are extremely disappointed with this decision and will continue to advocate for an executive order from the president. The unfortunate truth is that hard-working Americans can be fired simply for being gay or transgender.”

Winnie Stachelberg, another attendee and executive vice president at the liberal Center for American Progress, issued a statement expressing disappointment and citing studies “that gay and transgender people face disproportionately high rates of discrimination in the workplace.”

An administration spokesman, Shin Inouye, said in an e-mail, “The president is dedicated to securing equal rights for LGBT Americans and that is why he has long supported an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit employers across the country from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

    Obama Won’t Order Ban on Gay Bias by Employers, 11.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/us/politics/obama-wont-order-ban-on-gay-bias-by-employers.html

Gay Marriage Effort Attracts a Novel Group of Donors

March 23, 2012
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — On a warm Friday afternoon three years ago, Rob Reiner, the director, arrived for lunch at the Beverly Hills estate of David Geffen, the entertainment mogul. Mr. Reiner and his political adviser, Chad H. Griffin, had spent six months drafting an ambitious legal campaign aimed at persuading the United States Supreme Court to establish a constitutional right of same-sex marriage.

Mr. Reiner, joined by Mr. Griffin and Mr. Reiner’s wife, Michele, told Mr. Geffen they would need $3 million to challenge Proposition 8, a California voter initiative approved the previous November banning same-sex marriage. He informed Mr. Geffen that they had recruited two renowned lawyers, David Boies, a Democrat, and Theodore B. Olson, a Republican, to argue the case.

“Our feeling is not to go state by state,” Mr. Reiner said. “Our strategy is to make this wind up in the United States Supreme Court and have this a settled issue for all time.”

Mr. Geffen asked few questions as they sat in the dining room off his screening room, with a sweeping view down his sculptured estate. He agreed before the dessert arrived to raise the money. “I said I’d give them half the money and raise the other half,” Mr. Geffen recalled. Mr. Geffen wrote a check for $1.5 million and asked Steve Bing, a friend and producer, to make up the rest.

That lunch was a milestone in the dramatic evolution of a behind-the-scenes fund-raising network whose goal is to legalize same-sex marriage from coast to coast. This emerging group of donors is not quite like any other fund-raising network that has supported gay-related issues over the past 40 years. They come from Hollywood, yes, but also from Wall Street and Washington and the corporate world; there are Republicans as well as Democrats; and perhaps most strikingly, longtime gay organizers said, there has been an influx of contributions from straight donors unlike anything they have seen before.

Mr. Griffin, who this month was named president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay advocacy group, recalled being at a September 2010 fund-raiser for the Proposition 8 legal fund at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, organized by, among others, Wall Street financiers and the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“I knew literally no one in the room,” said Mr. Griffin, whose fund-raising activities on behalf of the Obama campaign helped earn him a seat at President Obama’s table at the state dinner at the White House last week. “It was a very bizarre moment for me. It was really a turning point.”

Money does not always translate into political success, of course. While the network has bankrolled the legal case that led two courts to throw out Proposition 8 and also helped power a same-sex marriage bill to law in New York State, tough battles may lie ahead with marriage initiatives on five state ballots this year: Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Washington.

And opponents say that while they might be outmatched financially — the National Organization for Marriage said it had an annual budget of about $20 million, and estimates that the combined money being spent in support of same-sex marriage is many times that — they have a more saleable message. Brian S. Brown, the president of the organization, said voters had opposed same-sex marriage in the 30 times the question has been on a ballot since 2000.

“We know what we have to do to win,” he said. “We have shown we did not need to match them dollar for dollar. I would love to. But we’ve won without doing that.”

The seed money collected at the Geffen home — part of millions of dollars that have flown into campaigns to finance court battles, initiative efforts and the campaigns of sympathetic state lawmakers — was an early indicator of the changing donor network. Mr. Geffen is gay; Mr. Bing is straight. Mr. Bing is known as a big contributor to political causes, but associates said this was only the second time he had ever made a major contribution to a gay-related cause.

The Republican support for the effort largely began after Mr. Olson, a solicitor general under President George W. Bush, lent it his name. It accelerated with the fund-raising role of Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and of Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign, who announced he is gay 18 months ago and has since helped raise close to $3 million by fishing in waters where gay organizers had rarely gone before.

As surprising — and encouraging — to organizers of the movement are the Wall Street names added to their roster. Prominent among them is Paul Singer, a hedge fund manager who is straight and chairman of the conservative Manhattan Institute. He has donated more than $8 million to various same-sex marriage efforts, in states including California, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Oregon, much of it since 2007.

“It’s become something that gradually people like myself weren’t afraid to fund, weren’t afraid to speak out on,” Mr. Singer said in an interview. “I’m somebody who is philosophically very conservative, and on this issue I thought that this really was important on the basis of liberty and actual family stability.”

The New York fund-raiser was sponsored by Mr. Singer and Mr. Mehlman, among others, and drew a crowd that included Henry R. Kravis, a private equity investor; Daniel S. Loeb, a hedge fund manager; Lewis M. Eisenberg, a former finance chairman for the Republican National Committee; and Steve Schmidt, who managed the 2008 presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.

“I try to look for places where there is both a financial and political angle,” Mr. Mehlman said. “So the fact that we were able to get prominent Republicans and businesspeople, some of whom were involved before but others who are new, helped in the effort both financially and politically.”

This is on top of a network of wealthy gay men and women who have a history of giving money to philanthropic causes and in recent years have shifted much of their effort to same-sex marriage.

Tim Gill, a billionaire software developer from Colorado, who is gay, has assembled a network that has been likened to a gay version of Emily’s List, which supports female candidates. Mr. Gill’s foundations have distributed over $235 million to gay-related causes, with much going to promote same-sex marriage, his advisers said.

“My husband and I are legally married in some states but obviously not married in others, so that’s a pretty big focus,” Mr. Gill said.

David Bohnett, a co-founder of GeoCities and a gay philanthropist here, has donated more than $4 million over the past 10 years to candidates and organizations supporting same-sex marriage, his advisers said.

And this week, Freedom to Marry, a group that advocates same-sex marriage, announced on Thursday a $3 million fund-raising campaign aimed at winning the five ballot initiatives and pushing the New Jersey Legislature to override the veto by Gov. Chris Christie of a same-sex bill, said Evan Wolfson, the founder of Freedom to Marry.

The first $250,000 is coming from Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, and his fiancé, Sean Eldridge. “Chris and I certainly prioritize in our contributing,” Mr. Eldridge said. “Marriage is a top priority.”

Mr. Brown said the same-sex-marriage cause had been greatly helped by people like Mr. Hughes. “A couple of billionaires go a long way,” he said. But Mr. Wolfson said the “vast majority” of donations came from small donors.

The broadening of the coalition also reflects a concerted effort by backers of same-sex marriage to put straight and Republican supporters out front. “Prominent straight people from entertainment were crucial,” said Dustin Lance Black, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who wrote “8,” a play re-enacting the courtroom challenge to Proposition 8. “We wanted people who were not the usual suspects.”

A reading of Mr. Black’s play here, which raised more than $2 million, was notable for the participation of screen idol-type American actors like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who historically would have steered clear of this kind of production. Norman Lear, the television producer, wrote a $100,000 check even before Mr. Geffen had made his commitment. “It was the right moment and the right way to go,” he said.

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles,

and Kitty Bennett from St. Petersburg, Fla.

    Gay Marriage Effort Attracts a Novel Group of Donors, NYT, 23.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/us/gay-marriage-effort-is-attracting-a-novel-group-of-donors.html

Strange Justice

March 16, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID OSHINSKY

FLAGRANT CONDUCT
The Story of Lawrence v. Texas:
How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans
By Dale Carpenter
Illustrated. 345 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95.

Texas justice has rarely been kind to homosexuals. Take, for example, the case of Calvin Burdine, who was sentenced to death in 1984 for the murder of his male companion. Burdine’s court-­appointed lawyer, when not dozing, referred to his client as a “fairy.” The prosecutor, meanwhile, demanded the death penalty by arguing that gays actually look forward to the rewards of prison life. “Sending a homosexual to the penitentiary,” he claimed, “certainly isn’t a very bad punishment for a homosexual.” Astonishingly, a federal appeals panel first upheld the verdict on the grounds that nothing in the law guarantees a defendant the right to a fully conscious attorney. Burdine eventually won a new trial, at which he was again convicted, but this time sentenced to life in prison — a veritable candy store, it was said, for a “pervert” like him.

Texas, like most states, has a long history of criminalizing sodomy. What makes it special, however, is its obsession with the issue, which led Lone Star lawmakers to repeatedly refine their statutes over time. In 1943, Texas added oral sex to a long list of prohibited offenses. Thirty years later, it passed a law containing the “Homosexual Conduct” provision, which banned both oral and anal sex, but only when performed “with another individual of the same sex.” As such, the new law expanded the sexual freedom of heterosexuals while doing just the opposite for homosexuals. Put bluntly, it was now legal in Texas to have sex with a farm animal, but not with someone of the same gender.

The law was enforced in public spaces, like a park or a tavern, but rarely in private settings like a home. It was in most ways symbolic — a means to stigmatize gay men and women and keep them in the shadows. But it did earn a notorious, if indirect, endorsement in 1986, when a bitterly divided United States Supreme Court upheld a Georgia sodomy law in some ways similar to the one in Texas. The court had previously approved of “privacy” rights for both married and unmarried heterosexuals and for pregnant women. But in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, involving a police officer who had encountered a gay couple having sex in a private dwelling, it refused to go further. “The issue presented is whether the federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homo­sexuals to engage in sodomy,” Justice Byron White wrote for the majority. The answer was no.

The Supreme Court is not above correcting its worst mistakes. It took half a century to reverse itself on the evils of racial segregation, for example, but only three years to overturn its egregious 1940 ruling against those who refused, on religious grounds, to salute the American flag. Normally, the court follows the principle of stare decisis — “to stand by what is decided.” It is not inclined to challenge its own precedents unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Reversing Bowers was certainly possible; the vote had been 5 to 4, after all, and issues regarding same-sex couples were now receiving sympathetic media attention. But a second defeat was also possible, with unknown conse­quences for gay rights.

Dale Carpenter’s “Flagrant Conduct” is a stirring and richly detailed account of Lawrence v. Texas, the momentous 2003 decision that overturned Bowers. Carpenter, who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, tells the story through the eyes of the major players — the plaintiffs, arresting officers, attorneys, judges and prosecutors — most of whom were interviewed at length. The result is a book that turns conventional wisdom about Lawrence on its head. Indeed, the readers most likely to be surprised by “Flagrant Conduct” are those who think they already know the basic outlines of the case.

In the standard account, in 1998 four sheriff’s deputies from Harris County (Houston), responding to a false report of someone waving a gun, entered an apartment and, after loudly identifying themselves, found two men — Tyron Garner and John Lawrence — enthusiastically violating the Texas sodomy law. Both men had been drinking, and Lawrence was particularly aggressive, the deputies reported. Joseph Quinn, the lead officer, had several options. He could warn the two and let them go; he could charge them and issue citations; or he could arrest them and haul them off to jail. Quinn chose Option 3, setting Lawrence v. Texas in motion.

But Carpenter’s interviews tell a rather different story. Both Garner and Lawrence were shocked to learn of the charge against them: homosexual conduct. “I thought, ‘My God, we didn’t have sex,’ ” Lawrence recalled. Of the four officers in the apartment, two failed to note any sexual encounter, while the other two gave conflicting accounts — one vaguely recalling oral sex, and Quinn alone claiming to have seen anal sex. What is clear, from numerous interviews, is that Quinn had a well-earned reputation for turning minor disturbances into major confrontations, and that he was furious at Lawrence’s belligerence. “I’ll be honest with you,” one of the deputies says, “90 percent of the time people talk themselves into jail . . . just by running their mouth.” Back talk from homo­sexuals was galling enough; the fact that Lawrence was white and Garner black may have made things worse.

According to Carpenter, almost no one familiar with the incident believed the police report. The judge handling the case suspected that Quinn had either made up or embellished the sex charge, and the county’s top prosecutor seemed personally reluctant to pursue it. “I’m not sure I agree with government regulating private sex acts between consenting adults,” he told the press, “but it’s not my call.” What kept the case alive, Carpenter shrewdly explains, was relentless pressure from opposite sides of the political spectrum: Republicans seeking a “family values” issue, on one end; gay rights activists handed a good “test case,” on the other.

To some, Garner and Lawrence seemed a risky choice for this role. Both men had criminal records, and their “relationship” added a racial element to the mix. As Carpenter shows, however, these weaknesses were actually strengths. The pair’s transient roots meant they had “little to lose” in being outed as homosexuals in deeply conservative Houston, or in accepting a police report they knew to be false. When their time came to plead, the men followed their lawyers’ instructions and replied, “No contest.” These were “the last words Garner and Lawrence ever said in court about their case.”

In 1986, the team opposing the Georgia sodomy law had included a number of heterosexual attorneys in key positions. This time, the effort was controlled by Lambda Legal, a gay advocacy group. In 1986, Laurence Tribe, the distinguished Harvard Law School professor, had argued the case before the Supreme Court. This time, though Tribe lobbied hard for another go, the job fell to Paul Smith, a Yale Law School graduate who had clerked for Justice Lewis Powell before working as a litigator in Washington and only then coming out as gay. There was a poignant irony to Smith’s selection. Powell, a “genteel Southerner,” had provided the fifth and deciding vote in upholding Georgia’s sodomy law. Smith still wondered whether confiding in the justice might have made a difference, especially since Powell later admitted he had made a mistake in Bowers and should have voted the other way.

For Smith and Lambda Legal, the case against sodomy laws hung on the “twin pillars” of “equal protection and the due process right to privacy.” But Smith went further in his argument to the court. As Carpenter notes, he “articulated the substantive idea that sexual intimacy among gay Americans was a good thing, not merely a tolerable thing.” Gay partnerships strengthened the fabric of society, a perception Americans increasingly grasped and accepted. In recognizing this, Smith declared, the court would not be leading a reluctant nation to a moral precipice, but rather catching up with realities of modern life.

Peppered with questions, Smith handled himself well. The tensest moments came when Justice Antonin Scalia, a supporter of sodomy laws, mocked Smith’s view of constitutional protection. “I mean, suppose all the states had laws against flagpole sitting . . . and then almost all of them repealed those laws,” Scalia said. “Does that make flagpole sitting a fundamental right?” Flagpole sitting? In a case involving anal sex? The audience was stunned.

Arguing for Texas was Chuck Rosenthal, the flamboyant, if woefully unprepared, Harris County district attorney. His brief was simple: the Supreme Court had rightly decided this issue in Bowers, and there was no reason to reverse. Sodomy laws reflected the people’s wisdom channeled through their elected representatives. When such laws become archaic, they should be discarded by the legislatures, not tossed out by the courts — in short, judicial restraint.

It is impossible in this limited space to convey the sheer ineptitude of Rosenthal’s presentation. At one point, Justice Scalia had to warn the hapless district attorney that he was about to answer a trick question. “Don’t fall into that trap,” he scolded. Within minutes, the justices were ignoring Rosenthal’s inane responses and arguing the merits themselves, leading Chief Justice William Rehnquist to suggest that “maybe we should go through counsel.” The highlight came when a frustrated Justice Stephen Breyer innocently requested a “straight answer” from Rosenthal, sending waves of laughter through the room.

The decision, announced on June 26, 2003, was sweeping in tone. “We conclude . . . Bowers was not correct when it was decided and it is not correct today,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. “Its continuance as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual persons.” Scalia, Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas dissented. The court, Scalia said, had “largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.”

Much has happened since that fateful day. Both Garner and Lawrence have died, and Rosenthal, the “family values” district attorney, resigned in disgrace after the disclosure of an adulterous affair with his secretary. The years have seen the rapid expansion of gay rights, with a state-by-state push for same-sex marriage heading the list. And much of this progress can be traced to Lawrence v. Texas, with its message of tolerance and inclusion in American life. Never again, Carpenter writes, would gay men and women be left to worry “whether the words engraved on the pediment of the Supreme Court building, ‘Equal Justice Under Law,’ included them. The Constitution was now their constitution, too.”

    Strange Justice, NYT, 16.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/books/review/the-story-of-lawrence-v-texas-by-dale-carpenter.html

Mystery Witness in Rutgers Case Tells of Webcam Unease

March 2, 2012
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — As he and his new boyfriend lay naked on a bed in a nondescript dormitory room at Rutgers University, the man sensed he was being spied on.

“I just happened to glance over,” the man, now a nervous and heavily shielded star witness, told a courtroom here on Friday. “It just caught my eye that there was, you know, a camera lens looking directly at me.”

As he left the room that night, he testified, a group of students were standing nearby, joking and looking at him in a way that unsettled him. When they met again two nights later, he heard students laughing outside.

He wanted to see his new boyfriend again — they had been exchanging e-mails for weeks now, but had had only three dates, and were texting furiously in the hopes of setting up another one. But he was not sure he would return to the dorm.

“I felt a little uneasy about it,” he said.

He never saw his new boyfriend, Tyler Clementi, again. Mr. Clementi, an 18-year-old student at Rutgers, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge the next evening, Sept. 22, 2010, after posting a message on Facebook that ended, “sorry.”

It was two weeks later, when prosecutors went to his house, that the man learned that the camera, on Mr. Clementi’s roommate’s computer, had been used to view them as they had sex.

The roommate, Dharun Ravi, is on trial in Superior Court on charges that he set up the camera and encouraged others to watch its images of the men having sex. Prosecutors have charged him with invasion of privacy, bias intimidation and hindering apprehension, after, they say, he tried to cover up his Twitter messages to friends encouraging them to watch. He is not charged in Mr. Clementi’s death.

The man was the most anticipated witness in the trial — the small windowless courtroom in the Middlesex County Courthouse had been packed with spectators and reporters for three days with the promise of his testimony.

He is identified in court documents only as “M.B.,” and before he came in the room the judge warned the journalists assembled that they could not record or photograph the man.

M.B., who appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s, entered with his shoulders hunched, seeming to twitch as he walked, as if he was on trial rather than a witness. He had close cropped hair and a bit of a 5 o’clock shadow, He wore a blue and white striped shirt, more casual than the well-tailored suits of Mr. Ravi and his friends who have testified. In the courtroom he did not look, as Mr. Ravi’s friends have described him, “scruffy” or “shady.”

He testified that he and Mr. Clementi met in an online chat room for gay men in early August 2010, then exchanged instant messages and text messages for several weeks. Mr. Clementi, an accomplished violinist, told the man he was going to Rutgers early, before the regular start of the fall semester, for a music program. They agreed that it made sense to wait until Mr. Clementi was at Rutgers to meet in person.

“We were just talking, getting to know each other at that time,” he said. “I was comfortable, he was comfortable, until he was coming closer to actually meet in person.”

Their first date was a few weeks later, on Thursday, Sept. 16. They met twice more, on the next Sunday and Tuesday, before Mr. Clementi, who had only recently told his parents he was gay, went to the bridge and committed suicide.

At first the room seemed like a normal dorm room, he testified.

But then, he told a prosecutor, “I had just glanced over my shoulder and I had noticed there was a webcam that was faced toward the direction of the bed, and I just thought it was kind of strange. Just being in a compromising position and seeing a camera lens — I guess it just stuck out to me that if you were sitting at a desk using the computer, that camera wouldn’t be facing that direction, it would be facing the person at the computer.”

The man was the witness whom both the prosecution and the defense had been waiting for. To prosecutors, M.B. is a victim of harassment based on sexual orientation — a proxy of sort for Mr. Clementi.

To the defense, M.B. was evidence that Mr. Ravi was not motivated by bigotry but by suspicion — of an older man who appeared out of place among the college freshmen in the dorm. Mr. Ravi’s lawyers contend that he set up the webcam because he was afraid that the man would steal his valuable computer equipment.

    Mystery Witness in Rutgers Case Tells of Webcam Unease, NYT, 2.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/nyregion/in-rutgers-case-mystery-man-testifies-about-noticing-a-webcam.html

Gay Marriage Close to Legal in Maryland

February 23, 2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Gay marriage is all but legalized in Maryland after the legislature gave its final OK Thursday to the law that's being sent to Gov. Martin O'Malley, who said he expects to sign it sometime this week.

The state Senate voted 25-22 for the law. The vote comes less than a week after the House of Delegates barely passed the measure.

Maryland will become the eighth state to allow gay marriage when O'Malley — who sponsored the bill — signs the legislation. The Democrat made the measure a priority this session after it stalled last year.

"This issue has taken a lot of energy, as well it should, and I'm very proud of the House of Delegates and also the Senate for resolving this issue on the side of human dignity, and I look forward to signing the bill," O'Malley said in a brief interview after the Senate vote.

Opponents, though, have vowed to bring the measure to referendum in November. They will need to gather at least 55,726 valid signatures of Maryland voters to put it on the ballot and can begin collecting names now that the bill has passed both chambers.

Some churches and clergy members have spoken out against the bill, saying it threatens religious freedoms and violates their tradition of defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

"The enormous public outcry that this legislation has generated — voiced by Marylanders that span political, racial, social and religious backgrounds — demonstrates a clear need to take this issue to a vote of the people," Maryland Catholic Conference spokeswoman Kathy Dempsey said in a statement. "Every time this issue has been brought to a statewide vote, the people have upheld traditional marriage."

Leaders at the Human Rights Campaign, a group that joined a coalition of organizations to advocate for the bill, said they expect opponents will gather the required number of signatures.

"There remains a lot of work to do between now and November to make marriage equality a reality in Maryland," Joe Solmonese, HRC president said in a statement released Thursday. "Along with coalition partners, we look forward to educating and engaging voters about what this bill does: It strengthens all Maryland families and protects religious liberty."

Senators rejected some amendments to the legislation Thursday. Proponents warned that amending the bill could kill it because gathering enough support for altered legislation in the House would be difficult.

Last year senators passed a similar measure by 25-21, but the bill died in the House after delegates rescinded their initial support citing concerns that it could violate religious liberties of churches and business owners who do not support same-sex unions.

Sen. Allan Kittleman, the only Senate Republican to vote in favor of the legislation, said he is proud of his decision and not concerned about political consequences down the road.

"You don't worry about politics when you're dealing with the civil rights issue of your generation," said Kittleman, R-Howard, the son of the late Sen. Robert Kittleman, who was known for civil rights advocacy.

Christy and Marie Neff, who married in Washington, D.C., where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2010, stood outside the Senate chamber Thursday evening as crowds surrounded O'Malley and other key supporters.

The couple, who lives in Annapolis, has lobbied lawmakers to support the bill in recent years.

"This is our victory and we're going to savor this because you can only really jump one hurdle at a time," Christy Neff said. "So we're going to savor this and then if they bring it to referendum, we'll match that effort with the same sort of effort we did today."

____

Associated Press Writer Brian Witte contributed to this story.

    Gay Marriage Close to Legal in Maryland, NYT, 23.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/02/23/us/AP-US-Gay-Marriage-Maryland.html

Gay Marriage, Passed, Awaits Veto by Christie

February 16, 2012
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

TRENTON — The New Jersey Assembly approved a bill legalizing same-sex marriage on Thursday, setting up a confrontation with Gov. Chris Christie, who promised a swift veto and defied the Legislature to put the issue before voters instead.

In two hours of passionate debate, Democrats supporting the measure urged their colleagues to make history, comparing the fight for legalization of same-sex marriage to battles for women’s suffrage and against racism.

“We can make a giant leap forward today in the fight against one of the last legalized barriers to equal rights,” said Sheila Y. Oliver, the Assembly speaker, whose voice broke at several points as she exhorted her colleagues to support the bill.

The State Senate passed a similar bill on Monday; the Assembly vote was the first time the Legislature united in endorsing same-sex marriage.

And the vote, passing 42 to 33, underscored how much opinion has shifted since two years ago, when the Senate rejected a similar bill. New York State legalized same-sex marriage last year, and this month Washington State did so. The bill passed on Thursday would make New Jersey the eighth state that allows gay and lesbian couples to marry.

But advocates for the bill in New Jersey face a new fight: trying to win enough votes to override the governor’s expected veto.

Mr. Christie is a rising star in the Republican Party, in which any politician with national ambitions must consider social conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage. After New Jersey Democrats, who control the Legislature, said they would make same-sex marriage a top priority this year, the governor proposed putting the issue to voters in a referendum in November.

On Thursday, Mr. Christie declared the Legislature’s action merely “an exercise in theater.”

“I’ve given them an alternative,” said Mr. Christie, who spent the day holding a news conference to announce that WrestleMania was coming to MetLife Stadium in 2013 and appearing at a fund-raiser for a Republican running for the United States Senate. “Put it on the ballot and let the people decide.”

Democrats have accused him of avoiding an issue that could hurt his national prospects, and said they would refuse to pass the legislation required to put a referendum on the ballot.

Mr. Christie has 45 days to veto the bill. If he does, the Democrats will have nearly two years to muster the two-thirds majority needed to override it.

“We’re going to take the time we need, assisted by a changing world,” said Steven Goldstein, the chairman of Garden State Equality, a gay rights group. “Look at how the world has changed from two years ago.”

While the measure in the Senate found only 14 votes in 2010, this week it passed with 24. Assembly Democrats said they would have had two more votes, from Republicans, if two members had not been on vacation. Four Democrats voted against the bill on Thursday, and no Republicans voted in favor.

Mr. Goldstein said his group’s budget this year was one-tenth what it was two years ago. National advocacy groups did not put as much money into the battle, disappointed over the failure of the legislation two years ago. Instead, he said, supporters will push their case in person, reminding legislators that same-sex couples are their relatives and friends.

The governor’s refusal to support same-sex marriage could also backfire, some noted.

“The meanness question is going to come out,” said Assemblyman Reed Gusciora of Mercer County, one of two openly gay members of the Legislature and the bill’s chief sponsor.

An override would be easier in the Senate, where it would need 27 votes; in the Assembly, it would require 54.

The debate on Thursday, however, reflected the shifting landscape. Several legislators who are leaders in black churches that oppose same-sex marriage spoke of agonizing over the legislation but ultimately deciding to support it.

“I came to the conclusion that the people sent me here from my district, here to protect what’s right,” Assemblywoman Cleopatra G. Tucker, a Democrat from Newark, said. “To protect the rights of everyone.”

Others echoed Assemblyman Louis Greenwald of Cherry Hill, the majority leader, saying that in 50 years, people will look back and wonder, “What was all the fuss about?”

Some said that there would be economic benefits in same-sex marriage, that weddings could mean $250 million in business for the state and 800 additional jobs. If the state does not pass it, they said, it risks losing residents and their tax revenue to New York, where same-sex marriage is legal.

Polls show that a slight majority of New Jersey voters support same-sex marriage. They also show that about the same percentage supports the governor’s idea of putting it on the ballot.

Democrats argue that same-sex marriage is a matter of civil rights, and that civil rights should not be subject to referendum. They note that the last time the state put a question of civil rights on the ballot, in 1915, the male voters of New Jersey declined to allow women the right to vote.

Democrats predict that a referendum would bring a flood of outside money from national groups opposed to same-sex marriage. It could also draw out conservative voters to lift the hopes of the Republican presidential nominee in a state that would otherwise be expected to tilt toward President Obama.

In speeches on Thursday, Republicans argued that the decision to change an institution as sacred as marriage was better made by voters than by the 121 members of the Legislature.

“I trust the people of New Jersey and I believe they should be allowed to voice their opinion in a vote,” said Assemblywoman Nancy F. Munoz of Summit.

As she spoke, a crowd, largely of Orthodox Jewish men in the balcony sprang to its feet and cheered.

The question of same-sex marriage continues to make its way through the state’s courts. In 2006, the State Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to the same protections as heterosexual couples, but left it up to the Legislature to decide how to guarantee those rights. The Legislature passed a civil unions law, but seven gay couples have sued the state, arguing that the law discriminates against them in matters like obtaining a mortgage or seeing partners in the hospital.

Senator Loretta Weinberg, a sponsor of the legislation,

said, “Our legislature stood up in both houses and stood up on behalf of marriage.”

    Gay Marriage, Passed, Awaits Veto by Christie, NYT, 16.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/nyregion/veto-awaits-new-jersey-bill-allowing-gays-to-wed.html

Gay Marriage a Tough Sell with Blacks in Maryland

February 15, 2012
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — As a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Maryland hurtles toward a vote in the legislature this week, a coalition lobbying for its passage has focused much of its efforts on a group of Democrats who could potentially scuttle its success: African-Americans.

It is the most serious attempt by advocates for same-sex marriage to win over blacks, who have traditionally been skeptical, and whose support is critical for the bill’s passage in this state, where nearly a third of the population is African-American, a far higher share than in the broader population.

The campaign includes videos of well-known African-American Marylanders, including Michael Kenneth Williams, an actor from the television series “The Wire,” and Mo’nique, a Baltimore-born actress; an editorial in The Afro; and conversations in churches and union halls, where most members are black.

The Human Rights Campaign and the Service Employees International Union have sent dozens of workers and volunteers, many of them African-American, across the state to talk about the issue. Particular attention is being paid to Baltimore and Prince George’s County, organizers said, two majority-black areas where skepticism has been strong.

It is uncertain whether the effort will lead to the bill’s passage; a similar bill failed in the House last year without coming to a vote. But it has had one clear effect, that of opening a difficult conversation about homosexuality among one group that has traditionally shied away from talking about it.

“It’s a very sensitive subject in the black community,” said Ezekiel Jackson, a political organizer for the 1199 Service Employees International Union in Maryland, who has been meeting with members, mostly health care workers, to persuade them to support the bill. “The culture is different. Gay people got pushed off into their own circle. Instead of dealing with it, they just lived their lives among like minds, apart.”

Much of the hesitation, black advocates of the bill say, has its roots in the churches, whose influence is strong among many African-Americans. And while the overwhelming majority of black clergy in the state still strongly oppose same-sex marriage — they held a rally here in the state capital last month to make that point — a few young pastors have come out in support.

“This was an issue I knew I could not avoid,” said the Rev. Delman Coates, 39, one of two Baptist preachers who testified in support of the bill in a hearing last week. “Clergy leaders have been organizing against this, and I didn’t want my silence to sound like consent.”

The soul-searching in Maryland on same-sex marriage shows just how delicate the issue can be for Democrats around the country who count on strong African-American support at the polls.

It presents a tricky equation for President Obama, who cannot risk depressing turnout among blacks, as their votes will be critical in what is shaping up to be a closely fought campaign. Mr. Obama, who has in the past opposed same-sex marriage, has said his views are “evolving.” In July, he endorsed a bill to repeal the law that limits the legal definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman.

Among those opposing the bill in Maryland is Pastor Joel Peebles of Jericho City of Praise, a megachurch in Prince George’s County. “The black community is watching with a great deal of concern regarding how our legislators vote on this bill,” he said. “Their decision will be strongly in the mind of the voters when they go to the polls.”

Maryland’s Democrats are sharply divided by race on the issue. A Washington Post poll published on Jan. 30 found that 71 percent of white respondents supported it, while 24 percent did not. Among blacks, 41 percent were supportive, while 53 percent were opposed. African-Americans are an important constituency here: their share of the population — 29 percent — is greater than in many Southern states, including Alabama and South Carolina, according to the Brookings Institution.

In the Maryland House, the bill needs 71 votes to pass. Only two Republicans have pledged their support; the rest are expected to oppose the measure. Of the 98 Democrats in the House, as many as 30 are said to be undecided, a majority of them African-Americans.

Still, advocates are cautiously optimistic. Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, proposed the bill and has pushed it energetically, in the fashion of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

“There’s been an evolution here in our state on this issue,” he said in an interview. “The wave of opinion on this is pretty unmistakable.”

But resistance runs deep in the faith community. Last year, several traditional black churches formed the Maryland Marriage Alliance, an umbrella group opposed to the bill that includes the Maryland Catholic Conference.

“Households are going to be turned upside down because of this,” said the Rev. Ralph A. Martino, senior pastor at First Church of Christ (Holiness) USA in Washington, who attacked Mr. Coates’s position on a radio show.

Mr. Coates acknowledged that his position was unpopular, but said he was trying to give people a way to accept the bill by presenting it as a matter of rights, not religious doctrine. He said that most in his congregation — about 8,000 people in Prince George’s County — seemed to understand the distinction, and that the loudest opposition had come from other pastors.

“People in the pews are much farther along than those in the pulpit,” he said.

The Rev. Larry Brumfield, a pastor in Baltimore who has a weekly radio show on gay issues that focuses on a black audience, agreed. Still, he said that many churchgoers adopt the views of their pastors, who in traditional black churches in Maryland are still almost entirely opposed to the bill. That makes Mr. Brumfield, an African-American, “feel the need to be extra vocal.”

“It really bothers me how black people can be so insensitive to oppression,” he said. “They use the same arguments that were used against us by the segregationists in the 1950s.”

Whatever the bill’s fate, the process of talking about it has changed something for black people here, supporters say. Mr. Jackson, the union worker, said a colleague had come into his office recently and broken down in tears. Her daughter is gay, the woman said, and they had never spoken of it, choosing instead to pretend it was not there. Soon after, she called her daughter, Mr. Jackson said, and told her she accepted her.

“For the first time, many people who were not able to talk about it are seeing how important it is, and are talking,” said Tawanna P. Gaines, a Democratic lawmaker who supports the bill. “People are saying, ‘Here’s an opportunity for me to no longer have to lie about this.’ ”

    Gay Marriage a Tough Sell with Blacks in Maryland, NYT, 15.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/us/maryland-gay-marriage-faces-black-skepticism.html

New Jersey Senate Votes to Legalize Gay Marriage

February 13, 2012
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

TRENTON — The New Jersey State Senate voted on Monday to legalize same-sex marriage, a significant shift in support from two years ago, when a similar measure failed.

The legislation faces a vote on Thursday in the State Assembly, but even if that chamber passes the measure, as expected, Gov. Chris Christie, who favors holding a referendum on the issue, has said he will veto it.

But advocates hailed the Senate vote as a huge advance, noting that they won 10 more votes than they did two years ago. And both supporters and opponents said they were surprised by the margin: the bill needed 21 votes to succeed and passed 24 to 16.

“The margin brought the notion of an override out of fantasyland,” said Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, a gay rights group. “Before today, I would have said the chances of an override were one in a million. Now I’d say it’s about one in two.”

Overriding the anticipated veto would require the approval of two-thirds of both houses, which in the Senate translates to 27 votes. But Democrats, who control the Legislature and have made the bill their top priority this year, argue that they have nearly two years — until the session ends on Jan. 14, 2014 — to muster just three more votes than they won on Monday.

Most significantly, supporters won the support of the Senate president, Stephen M. Sweeney, who abstained from voting two years ago. He has since called that the biggest mistake of his political life, and is the bill’s chief proponent. As the tally was flashed on a board above the Senate chamber, Senator Sweeney, a Democrat from Gloucester County, thrust a thumbs-up in the air.

“These are human beings with feelings that love their partners and they want to be married,” he said. “So be it.”

It was the first time a chamber of the Legislature endorsed the idea of same-sex marriage.

Just one senator, Gerald Cardinale, a Republican of Bergen County, spoke against the measure, arguing that it cheapened the institution of marriage. “This bill simply panders to well-financed pressure groups and is not in the public interest,” he said.

Senator Jennifer Beck, of Monmouth County, who voted no two years ago, was one of two Republicans to vote yes this time. “Our republic was established to guarantee liberty to all people,” she said. “It is our role as elected representatives to protect all of the people that live in our state.”

Seven states and Washington, D.C., allow same-sex marriage, but it has encountered unexpected hurdles in some relatively liberal East Coast states like New Jersey. More than two years ago, Gov. Jon S. Corzine, whom Mr. Christie had recently defeated, promised to sign a bill allowing same-sex marriage in the last days of his administration. But Mr. Corzine’s fellow Democrats could not marshal the votes to get it through the Legislature.

Mr. Christie, a Republican, has said the issue should be put on the ballot in November as a constitutional amendment. Some polls have found that a slight majority of New Jersey voters support same-sex marriage. Advocates note, however, that in 31 states where same-sex marriage has been put to a referendum, it has failed.

On Monday, Mr. Sweeney said there was “not a chance in hell” that he would support the legislation required to put the question to a ballot, which he said would mean allowing “millions of dollars to come into this state to override a civil right.”

Some opponents dismissed the vote, saying the governor’s veto would make it irrelevant.

But Rabbi Noson Leiter, a spokesman for Garden State Parents for Moral Values, which opposes the measure, said he was surprised at how many legislators supported the bill — eight who voted no or did not vote two years ago supported it this time. “If they put it to a referendum, the numbers would be reversed,” Rabbi Leiter said.

In 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to the same protections as heterosexual couples, but left it up to the Legislature to determine how to guarantee those rights. The Legislature responded with a law allowing civil unions.

Advocates of legalizing same-sex marriage say that the law has created, at best, a system of separate but equal treatment. Seven gay or lesbian couples have sued the state, arguing that civil unions still leave them at a disadvantage in decisions on health care, in retirement benefits and in access to the emotional satisfaction of a legal marriage.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 13, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized State Senator Jennifer Beck’s vote. She was one of two Republicans to vote Monday for the bill on same-sex marriage; she was not one of only two senators to vote for it.

    New Jersey Senate Votes to Legalize Gay Marriage, NYT, 13.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/nyregion/new-jersey-senate-votes-for-gay-marriage.html

Washington Governor Signs Gay Marriage Bill

February 13, 2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Gov. Chris Gregoire handed gay rights advocates a major victory Monday, signing into law a measure that legalizes same-sex marriage in Washington state, making it the seventh in the nation to allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.

Gregoire signed the bill surrounded by gay rights supporters. "I'm proud our same-sex couples will no longer be treated as separate but equal," she said.

It's a historic moment for the state, but same-sex couples can't walk down the aisle just yet.

The law takes effect June 7, but opponents on multiple fronts already are preparing to fight.

Opponents filed Referendum 73 Monday afternoon. If they collect the more than 120,577 valid voter signatures by June 6, the law will be put on hold pending the outcome of a November vote. Separately, an initiative was filed at the beginning of the legislative session that opponents of gay marriage say could also lead to the new law being overturned.

Gay marriage supporters said that while they are ready for a campaign battle, they are allowing themselves to celebrate first.

"You have to relish this moment," said 31-year-old Bret Tiderman of Seattle.

The state reception room at the Capitol was packed with hundreds of gay rights supporters and at least 40 lawmakers from the House and Senate to watch Gregoire sign the bill.

Sen. Ed Murray, a Seattle Democrat who is gay and has sponsored gay rights legislation for years, told the cheering crowd: "My friends, welcome to the other side of the rainbow. No matter what the future holds, nothing will take this moment in history away from us."

The House passed the bill on a 55-43 vote last Wednesday. The Senate approved the week before.

As the Democratic governor signed the legislation Monday, a man shouted, "Do not betray Christ!" However, his voice was overwhelmed by gay-marriage supporters who cheered and spoke loudly during his outburst.

Bob Struble, 68, of Bremerton, was removed from the room and said he was given a warning by security. Struble said he believes the state will halt gay marriage in a public vote.

"We'll be doing everything we can to overturn this unfortunate law," Struble said.

Audrey Daye, of Olympia, cried as she watched Gregoire sign the bill into law. Daye, who grew up with two moms, brought her 7-year-old son, Orin, with her to watch the bill signing.

"I am so proud that our state is on the right side of history," she said.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who opposes gay marriage, was in town speaking with conservative voters. Santorum also met with Republican lawmakers at the Capitol Monday afternoon.

Santorum said he encouraged gay-marriage opponents "to continue the fight."

"There are ebbs and flows in every battle, and this is not the final word," he said.

Gregoire's signature comes nearly a week after a federal appeals court declared California's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional, saying it was a violation of the civil rights of gay and lesbian couples.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave gay marriage opponents time to appeal the 2-1 decision against Proposition 8 before ordering the state to allow same-sex weddings to resume. The judges also said the decision only applies to California, even though the court has jurisdiction in nine Western states.

Washington state has had domestic partnership laws since 2007, and in 2009 passed an "everything but marriage" expansion of that law, which was ultimately upheld by voters after a referendum challenge.

The coalition of opponents that filed Monday's referendum is called "Preserve Marriage Washington."

"I think in the end, people are going to preserve marriage," said Joe Fuiten, senior pastor at Cedar Park Church in Bothell who is involved in the referendum effort.

The Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage, which was involved in ballot measures that overturned same-sex marriage in California and Maine, has promised to work with Preserve Marriage Washington to qualify the referendum to overturn the new law.

Christopher Plante, a regional coordinator from NOM, attended the referendum filing and said that his group will be offering technical assistance to Preserve Marriage Washington, helping them gather signatures and raise money. He said that the campaign is likely to be expensive, estimating that between $2 million and $6 million could be spent on each side of the campaign.

Separately, an anti-gay marriage initiative was filed at the beginning of the session, but the language is still being worked out so no signatures have been collected yet. An initiative alone would not pause the law.

A campaign has already formed to fight any challenge to the new law. "Washington United for Marriage," a coalition of gay marriage supporters, formed in November to lobby the Legislature to pass the measure and to run a campaign against any referendum challenging it.

Gay marriage is legal in New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C.

Same-sex marriage also has the backing of several prominent Pacific Northwest businesses, including Microsoft Corp., Nike Inc. and Starbucks Corp.

The New Jersey Senate advanced a gay marriage bill Monday, and a vote is expected in the New Jersey Assembly on Thursday. Gov. Chris Christie, who is pushing for a public vote on the issue, says he'll veto the bill if it comes to his desk.

Legislative committees in Maryland heard testimony on gay marriage last week, and Maine could see a gay marriage proposal on the November ballot.

Proposed amendments to ban gay marriage will be on the ballots in North Carolina in May and in Minnesota in November.

___

The gay marriage bill is Senate Bill 6239.

____

Follow Rachel La Corte on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/RachelAPOly . Associated Press writer Mike Baker contributed to this report.

___

Online:

http://www.leg.wa.gov

    Washington Governor Signs Gay Marriage Bill, NYT, 13.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/02/13/us/AP-US-Washington-Gay-Marriage.html

Vote Moves Washington State Closer to Gay Marriage

February 8, 2012
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — Washington was poised Wednesday to become the seventh state to allow same-sex couples to marry after the State House gave final passage to such a bill. Gov. Christine Gregoire promised to sign it.

The governor is expected to do just that as soon as next week, but it is not likely to take immediate effect. Under state law, if opponents gather 120,000 signatures, the measure will be put to a public referendum before it can be enacted.

The Washington vote came just a day after a court ruling in California that struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage, and it precedes several other votes expected across the country that could keep the issue in the spotlight throughout this election year. Some will take place in legislative chambers, including in Maryland and New Hampshire, and some at the ballot box, including in Minnesota, North Carolina and, very likely, a referendum here in Washington on the bill the Legislature just passed by a vote of 55 to 43.

Advocates on both sides said Wednesday that, over the long term, their side would prevail, regardless of the conflicting developments that have defined the issue for several years.

Washington embodies the conflicts. It is among more than 30 states that have passed laws defining marriage as being between a man and a woman, but it has steadily expanded rights for gay couples since 2006, the year it approved a wide-ranging gay rights bill. In 2007, it approved rights for domestic partners. In 2009 it passed a so-called everything-but-marriage bill.

Full marriage rights began speeding toward approval last month, when Ms. Gregoire announced that she would file the bill to make same-sex marriage legal.

The governor, a Democrat now in her second and final term, had said that she did not believe that the state was ready for same-sex marriage and that churches should play a decisive role on the issue. Ms. Gregoire’s bill, modeled after one approved by New York in June, allows churches and religious groups to choose not to perform same-sex marriages and to deny same-sex couples access to their facilities for weddings.

Recent debate here has been relatively measured. The Senate passed the bill easily last month, 28 to 21.

“We very deliberately undertook an incremental approach,” said Representative Jamie Pedersen, the bill’s prime sponsor in the House. “We believe we’ve benefited from taking steps only when we’re likely to be successful.”

The issue may be more contentious elsewhere. In North Carolina, voters will decide in May on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Minnesota will vote on a similar measure in November. Austin R. Nimocks, a lawyer who argues against same-sex marriage for the Alliance Defense Fund, noted that while some polls showed increasing support for gay marriage, voters had never approved it at the polls. In 31 statewide votes, voters have consistently defined marriage as between a man and a woman, he said.

“I don’t see a shift in momentum,” Mr. Nimocks said. “You can use all the polls you want. You can say anything you want to about civil unions or domestic partnerships, but when it comes to marriage, the record is clear.”

Supporters of same-sex marriage say the Washington vote, including the speed with which it has moved through the Legislature this year, is evidence of growing acceptance.

Michael Cole-Schwartz, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, said that over time, particularly in states that sanction gay unions in some form, supporters are able to show that “no one else’s relationship is harmed but that these particular families end up more secure.”

But Mr. Cole-Schwartz and others acknowledged that the number of states likely to pass same-sex marriage bills anytime soon was small. In Maryland, the Senate has approved same-sex marriage, but it faces a tougher fight in the House, including among some moderate black Democrats. Supporters are lobbying those lawmakers and enlisting help. The Rev. Al Sharpton has released a video in which he says: “If committed gay and lesbian couples want to marry, that is their business. None of us should stand in their way.”

New Jersey lawmakers could approve a bill as early as next week, but Gov. Chris Christie has said he would veto the measure.

In New Hampshire, Republicans are leading an effort to repeal gay marriage after the Legislature approved it in 2009. In Maine, a ballot measure will give voters the chance to approve same-sex marriage. It would be the first time that happened.

Washington, which would become the only state west of Iowa to allow same-sex marriages, is also expected to see the issue on the ballot this fall. In 2009, the state voted 53 to 47 to uphold its “everything but marriage” law, a vote supporters say is the only statewide vote nationwide that upheld gay unions.

Some lawmakers here have been on both sides of the issue. In 1998, Senator Jim Kastama, a moderate Democrat, voted in favor of the bill preventing same-sex marriage. On Wednesday, he planned to vote for same-sex marriage.

“I have a very good marriage of 17, 18 years,” Mr. Kastama said. “All the strength that I get from that, how can I deny someone else that?”

Mr. Kastama said he had changed his position after a “tremendous amount of introspection,” but he also cited economics. He said he believed marriage made communities financially and socially stronger, regardless of whether they were same-sex or between a man and a woman. The state has a budget deficit of about $1.5 billion.

“We have to become far more reliant on each other, and the government is not always going to be there,” Mr. Kastama said. “I think we all do better in committed relationships.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 8, 2012

A previous version of this article misstated the year Washington state

approved domestic parterships. It was 2007, not 2006.

    Vote Moves Washington State Closer to Gay Marriage, NYT, 8.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/us/washington-state-set-to-legalize-same-sex-marriage.html