Lawmakers take tough questions at MassEquality forum

[Ian David]

Issue Date: 1/25/2007, Posted On: 1/25/2007
Susan Ryan-Vollmar
[e-mail]

At a MassEquality-sponsored forum about ongoing efforts to defeat an anti-gay amendment to the state constitution that would prohibit same-sex couples from marrying, an extended back-and-forth between an attendee and state Rep. Mike Festa of Melrose and freshman Rep. William Brownberger of Belmont showed that the issue of whether the amendment should be killed procedurally is still unresolved — and quite sensitive.

The forum, attended by about 40 people Jan. 23 at the Unitarian Universalist First Parish Church in Arlington, began with a presentation by MassEquality Political Director Matt McTighe about how the amendment passed this session. The Rabbi Devon Lerner of the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry also spoke as did Festa, Brownberger and state Rep. Carl Sciortino of Somerville.

During the question-and-answer session with the public, Heather Fowles of Burlington asked lawmakers whether the option of killing the amendment procedurally was still under consideration. Fowles pointed out that lawmakers had defeated a healthcare amendment by parliamentary maneuver. Why was that okay, she asked, while it wasn’t okay to kill a measure seeking to take away civil rights in the same manner? As she spoke, she choked up and apologized for getting emotional.

Sciortino explained that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) decision Dec. 27 dismissing a lawsuit by former Gov. Mitt Romney, who asked the court to order lawmakers to take a vote, but also included strong language asserting that lawmakers had a constitutional duty to vote, on amendments brought by initiative petition undercut legislative support to adjourn the constitutional convention without voting on the amendment.

“We had people who were with us before the decision,” Sciortino said. Afterwards, however, many of his colleagues in the Legislature told him that they couldn’t “go against the Constitution.”

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Another audience member, Arlington resident David Valdes Greenwood, who is also the author of Homo Domesticus: Notes From A Same-Sex Marriage, offered an observation about the exchange. “I don’t know your backgrounds,” he said to Festa and Brownberger, “But you need to be careful when addressing members of a community whose rights are at stake when using the phrase ‘nobody feels this more deeply than I’ if this is not a matter that is going to affect your marriage,” he said. “It feels very differently to us because it is our lives.”


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