Rep. Christine Canavan on the MA gay marriage vote

[Ian David]

I am now 100% on-board and enthusiastically supporting Rep. Christine Canavan for re-election!

Rep. Christine Canavan on the MA gay marriage vote
by Laura Kiritsy
Bay Windows
Thursday Jun 28, 2007



<snip>

And then the more flak I got from the families and the gays and lesbians themselves in my area - even though I don’t fault them for it, because I would have been very upset if it had been me - but it just made me angry and so it kind of made me more steadfast and just continue to vote to put them on the ballot. No matter what the question was, as anyone can see from my record, it didn’t matter what the question was. And then when this one came up here, it was the final vote. It was the vote that really meant something, that would actually have initiated something good or bad and it was just very anguishing for me. It was terrible. It was terrible.

<snip>

During the process my district was targeted and people went around and knocked on doors and asked to call me to change my vote. I sometimes got - not tens and twenties, maybe less than 10 - but I would get some phone calls back from people who would say, "I only made that call because someone was standing there and dialed the phone and handed it to me." You know a few like that. And that kind of bothered me a little bit, that people actually wanted to call me back and tell me that they actually wanted it on the . I don’t know - it’s been an extremely strange time.

<snip>

Q: Did you consult with other folks in the legislature or your constituents? It sounds like you made this decision on your own.
A: I rely heavily on my husband. My husband is actually extremely astute about all things political and he can see - like that old saying goes - "the pulse of the people" because he belongs to so many clubs in the area and he’s so active, whether it’s the VFW, or the French Club or the White Eagles or the Italian Bocci Club or whatever {laughs}. When he hears people talking - and I’ll tell you it’s amazing when you go to those places and you hear people, what they’re talking about is basically a good to figure if the rest of the district is the same way. And I asked him, "I said what are you hearing?" He says, "People just aren’t talking about it the way they used to." He said, "You’ll always have your haters." And I drove the poor guy crazy for two weeks, so finally he said to me, "You have to stop anguishing about this and just make a decision about what you’re going to do and do it. And I talked to a very dear friend, John Walsh, I’ve known him - God, it’s got to be 15 or 20 years - I asked him what as the new chairman of the Democratic Party what he’s hearing out there, what are their polling numbers. I did consult him on that. I talked to my son Derek, my oldest son, he’s always good to bounce things off of. He’s a history teacher in the city. And I raised both my kids to be very ... street smart and I raised them to be very tolerant of everyone and everything, so they’re good to talk to. And I called my other son. And {State Rep.} Tom Kennedy, in the legislature, he’s the only one of our delegation that actually voted - it was a brief pass-by type thing. ... My father, but my father - it’s a generational thing, he’s 84 and the people he hangs with ... they really wanted to vote. I talked to a priest who calls me all the time, and, amazingly, he told me, rather than asking me point blank to vote to put it on the ballot, he basically did not ask me that this time. ... He basically said to me, "Christine vote your conscience."

<snip>

Q: Are you worried?
A: I feel a little good about having voted the way I would have voted four years ago if my district had not asked me - the majority so to speak had not said what’s wrong with letting us vote. You know Laura, in my district I have some large senior citizens housing complexes. One of them actually has over 300 apartments and it actually also is a polling place when there’s voting. So they don’t even have to get in a car, they just have to walk out of their apartment and walk downstairs and I heard a lot from people there who wanted just the right to vote. But I don’t really think - I’ll find out when I go there for office hours, if people start saying things to me, but I don’t know.


More:
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ci=108&ch=news&sc=glbt&sc2=features&sc3=&id=4868


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