1
1
2 A DISCUSSION ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY
3
4
5 REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS had at
6 the Marriage Equality Forum taken on January 26,
7 2004, before Patricia A. Armstrong, Certified
8 Shorthand Reporter, Registered Professional
9 Reporter and Notary Public in and for the County
10 of DuPage and State of Illinois, CSR License
11 No. 084-001766, at the hour of 6:00 p.m. held at
12 One IBM Plaza, Chicago, Illinois.
13 MODERATOR: ______
14 RICHARD WILSON, ESQ. --- 15 PANEL MEMBERS PRESENT: 16 EVAN WOLFSON, ESQ., 17 Executive Director of Freedom to Marry 116 West 23rd Street, Suite 500 18 New York, NY 10011 (212) 851-8418 19 and 20 PATRICIA M. LOGUE, ESQ., 21 Senior Counsel, Lambda Legal 11 East Adams Street, Suite 1008 22 Chicago, Illinois 60603 (312) 663-4413. 23 ---
24
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1 MS. MORSE: Good evening. I want to
2 officially welcome you to Jenner & Block.
3 I want to introduce you to our
4 managing partner, somebody who never hesitates to
5 support any kind of project that we want to do
6 here at Jenner & Block, but particularly these
7 kinds of events.
8 So to kick off this evening,
9 please welcome a friend, my partner, Bob Graham.
10 MR. GRAHAM: I want to thank everybody for
11 coming here tonight. There are some seats in the
12 back on that side of the room if you need a place
13 to sit. We do have a really nice crowd tonight
14 despite the weather. I think it is great that
15 everybody is here.
16 On behalf of Jenner & Block I
17 want to welcome everybody really on behalf of all
18 of the lawyers but also all the staff of the law
19 firm, and I promise you a really great discussion
20 tonight on marriage equality.
21 This is a topic that is in the
22 forefront of the news. It is part of the
23 politics of today as well as part of the law
24 today, so it should be a great topic to discuss.
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1 We have a number of co-presenters, and my job
2 right now is just to identify who those people
3 are.
4 The first is the American
5 Constitution Society, the Chicago Lawyers
6 Chapter.
7 We have a number of lawyers at
8 Jenner & Block who participate in this group, and
9 they deserve a special mention because they
10 brought in, I believe, the leading expert on this
11 topic, Evan Wolfson, is here today. He is going
12 to be introduced shortly.
13 Additional Co-presenters are
14 Lambda Legal, which will include, of course, Pat
15 Logue. Pat Logue is seated to the right. Pat
16 used to work at Jenner & Block. So we are always
17 glad to have her come back.
18 There is also Espiritu &
19 Associates, the court reporting firm. You
20 probably can't see them, but they are right up
21 here. We want to really thank them, because they
22 are our co-presenter, too.
23 Also, the Chicago Bar
24 Association's Committee on Lesbian and Gay Men,
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1 Matrimonial Law and Civil Rights Law.
2 We are going to have a
3 transcript of this event. So, if any of you
4 really want a transcript of this, I am sure you
5 could get it as well.
6 We are also very proud to host
7 this tonight. We were going to have another
8 speaker here, Bill Hohengarten, who is a Jenner &
9 Block partner from our Washington office; but he
10 got snowed in. When they get four inches of snow
11 in Washington, everything stands still.
12 (Laughter.)
13 MR. GRAHAM: But Pat Logue knows
14 everything about that case anyway. So Pat can
15 address really, I think, any of the pertinent
16 issues; and Bill I am sure is very sorry he can't
17 be here. You would have enjoyed hearing from
18 Bill.
19 There are lots of other
20 co-sponsors that are listed on your program, and
21 we want to thank them for co-sponsoring this
22 event; and finally, I am here to introduce
23 Richard Wilson, who is a partner at Nottage and
24 Ward.
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1 Richard told me before when we
2 were out in the lobby eating before we walked in
3 here, that he used to be a summer associate here.
4 So I didn't remember that, but he did. So, that
5 is great.
6 He is co-chair of the CBA
7 Committee on the Legal Rights of Lesbians and Gay
8 Men.
9 He is a member of the ISBA
10 standing committee on sexual orientation and
11 gender identity. He is also on the Board of the
12 AIDS Legal Council.
13 To introduce our panel and to
14 set the stage for the event, please join me in
15 giving him a round of applause.
16 (Applause.)
17 MR. WILSON: Bob, thanks for the
18 promotion. I was a clerk.
19 (Laughter.)
20 MR. WILSON: In any event, I am pleased
21 and honored to be here and to be a part of
22 putting together this event.
23 It is a critical moment in
24 history as far as many of us are concerned, and
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1 it is an appropriate time to welcome Evan Wolfson
2 to Chicago to speak to all of you and Pat Logue
3 as well on the issue generally and specifically
4 as regards to what is going on across the
5 country.
6 I find there is a lot of
7 understandable ignorance about what people can do
8 in Vermont or in Massachusetts or wherever, and
9 it's really not clear; and if it's not clear
10 among lawyers and among judges, particularly
11 lawyers and judges who may have a personal
12 interest in it, we certainly have a lot to do as
13 far as education is concerned.
14 I would like to introduce Evan
15 and Pat briefly.
16 Evan, as you know, his
17 biography is briefly contained in the program.
18 Evan has been in the forefront of this issue
19 since at least 10 years when the Baehr case
20 started in Hawaii in 1992 and 1994, first with
21 Lambda Legal and now as the founder and executive
22 director of Freedom to Marry, which is the
23 national coalition organization on the issue of
24 equal marriage rights.
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1 I am proud to introduce Evan.
2 You may have seen his letter to the editor in
3 last Friday's New York Times on the issue of
4 President Bush declaring during the State of the
5 Union that he was going to spend a billion and a
6 half dollars to promote marriage.
7 I think Evan has a lot to say.
8 He has been there through the whole history, and
9 we are proud to welcome him to Chicago.
10 MR. WOLFSON: Thank you. It's a great
11 turnout. Thank you very much.
12 I really want to just add my
13 thanks to the Chicago Bar Association and the
14 Illinois State Bar Association, the American Constitution Society,
15 and Jenner & Block for providing this wonderful space and supporting
16 this event, to Espiritu & Associates and my old
17 colleagues and friends and home, Lambda Legal,
18 and all the other organizations that have
19 sponsored this.
20 I want to thank you all for
21 coming out today. This is an incredibly
22 important moment in our nation's history, not to
23 mention in our lives as lesbians and gay men and
24 as non-gay people who care about same sex
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1 couples, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and
2 transgendered people.
3 We all have a stake in working
4 to make sure that our country keep its promise to
5 be in a country where everyone has the right to
6 be both equal and different and where no one has
7 to give up her or his difference in order to be
8 treated equally.
9 It is great to have these
10 kinds of sponsorships from these kinds of
11 organizations and this kind of roomful of people,
12 because it really makes us feel reminded
13 that we are among friends and we are not alone in
14 caring about those values of equality and holding
15 our country to its promise; but at the same time
16 when we come together in a group like this and
17 have the support of one another determined to do
18 something to shape history, it is sometimes easy
19 to lose sight of an important fact. That fact
20 is that in all 50 states today lesbians and gay
21 men, people who are different from the majority,
22 are second class citizens.
23 No matter how strong we may be
24 as individuals, no matter how rich our community,
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1 no matter how productive our lives, no matter how
2 dedicated we are, each and every one of us who is
3 gay is a second class citizen in this country;
4 and that is the backdrop against which we
5 struggle to hold our country to its promise.
6 We are denied important
7 protections for ourselves and for our families.
8 We are denied our basic equality as citizens. We
9 are denied simple dignity and respect for our
10 love, our loved ones, our personal commitment to
11 other human beings, and our families' equal worth.
12 This denial is shameful. It is un-American.
13 It is wrong.
14 It is contrary to the arc of
15 history, and we are the ones who are privileged
16 to be here today at a moment in time where
17 history is bending and we can change and
18 eliminate this injustice as part of the arc of
19 history toward equality, inclusion and respect.
20 Now, this second class
21 citizenship, of course, has prevailed throughout
22 all of American history.
23 It was there at the dawn of
24 the modern civil rights movement for lesbians and
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1 gay men with Stonewall in 1969.
2 It was the backdrop against
3 which same sex couples -- including
4 transgendered couples, including lesbian couples,
5 including gay couples -- challenged the exclusion
6 from marriage from the very birth of the gay
7 rights movement.
8 There was a wave of cases in
9 the early '70s, another set in the '80s. The exclusion
10 endured throughout the first 17 years of our
11 our movement's
12 history in which we challenged this
13 discrimination and exclusion against our
14 families, the exclusion from marriage, the second
15 class citizenship, and in that 17 years from 1969
16 to 1986. What we saw in 1986 was a decision from
17 the Supreme Court in the Hardwick case in which
18 the Court said that it was okay to deny gay
19 people basic constitutional protections.
20 It was okay to deny us what
21 the Court at that time called the right to
22 privacy, what the Court now calls more aptly, the
23 right to liberty, to personal freedom.
24 The Court said it was
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1 facetious to suggest that there is any connection
2 between gay people on the one hand and in the
3 Court's words procreation, family or marriage;
4 and, therefore, it was okay to deny us the basic
5 entitlements as citizens. That was the first 17
6 years of the modern gay history from '69 to '86.
7 What happened in the second 17
8 years from '86 to 2003 when we saw the wonderful
9 powerful heroic ruling of the Supreme Court in
10 the Lawrence case that my dear friend and
11 colleague, Pat Logue, who worked on that case, will talk
12 about.
13 What changed? What enabled
14 the Supreme Court to come back to the question of
15 gay people's entitlement and the constitutional
16 protection due intimacy and family and love, to
17 the constitutional standards of equality and
18 personal freedom? What enabled them to get right
19 in 2003 what they got so wrong in 1986?
20 Why were the second 17 years so
21 different from the first 17 years?
22 Well, the answer is that in
23 the 17 years between 1986 and 2003 we showed the
24 country and it turned out we showed the Court
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1 that in fact there is every connection between
2 gay people, like other human beings, and parenting
3 and family and, yes, marriage.
4 In the second 17 years of the
5 modern history of our movement we captured,
6 claimed, and reclaimed the vocabulary of love,
7 commitment, family, intimacy, self-sacrifice, and
8 dedication that is the vocabulary of marriage.
9 By claiming the word marriage, by getting the
10 country to put the words "gay" and "lesbian," "same sex
11 couple" and "marriage" in the same sentence, we
12 found a way of crystallizing a whole new
13 understanding of who we are and what we seek and
14 how wrong the exclusion is.
15 Now, we were not the first
16 people in this country's history to struggle to
17 claim the vocabulary, to claim the equality of
18 marriage.
19 In 1987, the year after we took
20 the five-to-four hit that seemed at the time
21 devastating and almost insurmountable from the
22 Supreme Court in the Hardwick case --
23 In 1987 another group of
24 Americans came before the United States Supreme
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1 Court challenging their exclusion
2 from the institution of marriage.
3 In order to address the
4 question of whether the government could exclude
5 that group of Americans from marriage, the
6 Supreme Court said we first need to determine
7 what is marriage under the American
8 Constitutional scheme.
9 What is marriage in American
10 modern life today?
11 What is marriage under the law
12 and under the standards of quality that our
13 constitution mandates?
14 The Supreme Court identified
15 four important, in their words, "attributes" or
16 elements of marriage today in American life.
17 Those four, the Supreme
18 Court said, are: first, "Marriage, the Court said,
19 is a paramount and important statement of one's
20 commitment to another that receives public
21 support, a statement of commitment personally
22 made to another that receives public support."
23 The second important attribute
24 of marriage, the Supreme Court, said is that
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1 marriage is for many people of great personal,
2 spiritual or religious significance.
3 It is a passage in life of
4 important spiritual and even religious dimension
5 for many.
6 The third important attribute
7 of marriage the Court identified is that marriage
8 offers at least the prospect of what
9 the Court, in its language, called physical
10 consummation, which most of us call something
11 else....
12 The fourth important attribute
13 of marriage the Court identified is that marriage
14 in our system is the gateway to a vast array of
15 tangible and intangible, public and private,
16 legal and economic protections, responsibilities,
17 and benefits that make a concrete and real
18 difference in people's lives in virtually every
19 area of their lives.
20 That is it. Those are the four attributes
21 of marriage identified by the Court in analyzing
22 the importance of the institution and the role it
23 plays under the law. Weighing those
24 interests, the Court said that the choice to
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1 marry, the freedom to marry is of great
2 importance; and these interests cannot be
3 arbitrarily denied to any group.
4 In weighing the interests, the
5 Court struck down the arbitrary restriction
6 enforced by the government against the group of
7 Americans who had come before the Court in 1987,
8 a unanimous ruling, by the way, written by that
9 flaming liberal, Sandra Day O'Connor.
10 Now, the group of Americans
11 who came before the Court in 1987 challenging
12 their exclusion from marriage was prisoners.
13 The Court said that these attributes of marriage
14 are so important in peoples' lives that they
15 cannot be arbitrarily denied even to convicted
16 felons.
17 Well, today in all 50 states
18 no matter how committed their relationship, no
19 matter how long they have been together, no
20 matter how much they need the protections and
21 responsibilities that come with marriage and come
22 only with marriage for their loved ones, same-sex
23 couples, lesbians and gay men are denied that
24 basic constitutional legal freedom to marry.
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1 As you all know here and what
2 brings us in such force tonight is that we all
3 know that history is again on the move and that
4 this exclusion like previous wrongs in American
5 history is coming to an end.
6 We also know it's not always going to be
7 pretty. We know it is not going to
8 happen overnight. We know that some states are
9 going to lead toward equality while others resist
10 to the very end.
11 We know that politicians are
12 going to demagogue as well as manifest profiles
13 in courage.
14 We know that the Courts are
15 going to split, and we know that the public is
16 grappling.
17 We know that our opponents are
18 on the move, but we know that we, too, can move and
19 we, too, can make a change.
20 Last year at the end of this
21 second 17-year arc the world really shifted,
22 because on June 10th, Judy Garland's birthday, a
23 new dynamic entered into American history. For the
24 first time in our nation's history, our country,
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1 the United States, is actually touching a country
2 that is treating its gay citizens with full and
3 equal respect.
4 As of June 10th, Canada began
5 ending marriage discrimination and thousands of
6 couples, including hundreds of American couples,
7 including couples in this very room, same sex
8 couples are now legally married; and Niagara Falls
9 is still falling, but the sky has not.
10 Those couples are role-
11 modeling for our non-gay neighbors the basic
12 reality here, which is that ending marriage
13 discrimination helps families, makes a real
14 difference in some people's lives, while hurting
15 no one.
16 Beginning with that June 10th
17 milestone, the cascade of events and steps toward
18 equality and exciting openings of possibilities
19 just did not stop.
20 We don't even have time to go
21 through all of them -- from Wal-Mart to the Episcopal
22 church.
23 Pat is going to talk about
24 Lawrence and the Supreme Court decision, and
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1 there all I have to say that I rarely agree
2 with Justice Scalia, but when he is right, he is
3 right.
4 He said in Lawrence that the
5 restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples
6 now rests on fairly shaky grounds, and he knows whereof
7 he speaks.
8 It didn't stop there, because
9 as the cascade of heroic and important steps
10 toward equality took place and as Americans every
11 week seemed to have to open their eyes to new
12 understanding, new news, new pictures, new
13 images, new "Queer Eye" arrangements, on November
14 18th another landmark event took place.
15 The high court of the State of
16 Massachusetts ruled that the exclusion from
17 marriage lacks any logical, sufficient, necessary,
18 good reason and government may not discriminate
19 against any group of Americans, may not
20 discriminate against couples in love when it
21 doesn't have a sufficient or good or necessary
22 reason; and, therefore, the denial of a marriage
23 license has to stop.
24 The Massachusetts high court
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1 ruled that the state has 180 days to clean up its
2 act, get the forms in order, get the clerk's
3 offices ready, and begin issuing the marriage
4 licenses.
5 Those 180 days expire on
6 May 17, 2004, the 50th anniversary of Brown
7 v. Board of Education; and right now in
8 Massachusetts we have a victory shimmering
9 within reach, the possibility of bringing home to
10 our American neighbors the reality that our
11 Canadian friends have already experienced -- that
12 marriage equality can be allowed without people being
13 harmed, that ending discrimination favors all and
14 hurts no one. At the same in Massachusetts we
15 see the same kinds of efforts to resist and flout
16 and delay and block the law that we have seen in
17 other civil rights movements in American history;
18 and history is watching now as they do what they
19 do and as we do all what we do.
20 Now, I said we are not the
21 first people to fight on the battleground of
22 marriage.
23 This is not the first time
24 that marriage has been the place on which
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1 questions of citizenship, equality and fairness
2 and people rising to the good angels of their
3 nature, and others resisting and manifesting the
4 worst, have played out.
5 We don't have the hours to spend
6 all the time going through the arc of history and
7 the ways in which marriage has been invoked, but
8 let me just briefly remind you of four major
9 changes in the institution of marriage and access
10 to it that have taken place within the lifetime
11 of most of the people in this room.
12 Our opponents like to say that
13 marriage has been the same for 6,000 years, and
14 that is why it should remain the same as if
15 somehow 6,000 years of doing something wrong is a
16 constitutional reason for not doing it right. But
17 they are not even right about their claim.
18 In our lifetime and not in
19 other countries but here in the United States,
20 there have been four major changes in the
21 institution of marriage, each at least arguably
22 as sweeping or as substantial a change in the law
23 of marriage as anything proposed here tonight;
24 Those four are: First, ending the invidious
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1 restrictions on who can marry whom based on race.
2 As most of you know here, that is not some
3 artifact from the Civil War.
4 The exclusion and the
5 restriction based on who can marry whom or
6 whether you are allowed to marry someone of
7 quote/unquote the "wrong" race continued in this
8 country until 1967 when in the best-named case
9 ever, Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court
10 said that must stop.
11 When the Supreme Court ruled
12 in Loving v. Virginia that our country's
13 promise of equality did not permit this kind of
14 restriction on marriage, the polls showed 70
15 percent of the American people supported
16 restrictions on interracial marriage, but the
17 Court did its job and our country is better for
18 it. That was the first revolution.
19 In the second revolution or
20 change in the marriage law, we ended the
21 restrictions that prevented people from leaving a
22 failed or abusive marriage.
23 It wasn't that long ago that
24 people literally had to leave their states and go
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1 to some other state in order to get out of an
2 abusive marriage; and when they came home from
3 Reno or wherever that classic, "The Women," might have you believe
4 it took place, when they came home, they often had
5 to litigate whether they were still married or
6 not, because some states would say divorce is against
7 God's law. It's against God's plan. It's against the definition of
8 marriage.
9 People literally did not know from
10 day to day or state to state whether they were
11 married or not; and eventually again the Court
12 stepped in and said, "It is intolerable to have a
13 country where people don't know from state to
14 state or day to day whether they are married," and
15 found that your divorce properly entered into
16 must be honored throughout the rest of the
17 country.
18 How anomalous it would be if
19 your divorce has to be honored throughout our
20 country but your marriage need not be.
21 The third major change in our
22 lifetime in the institution of marriage was a
23 very important one.
24 It was ending the legal
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1 subordination of women that took place in the
2 "traditional" institution of marriage.
3 It was not that long ago that
4 women who got married actually lost legal rights.
5 For much of American history women lost their
6 legal identity as a separate person when they got
7 married.
8 The whole Mr. and Mrs. "His
9 Name" thing reflected the law that said that
10 their identity was fused as one, and it was his.
11 Women lost legal rights when
12 they got married; and, again, this was no
13 artifact from some ancient era as our opponents now would like
14 people to believe.
15 As a young attorney, I myself --
16 while not doing pro bono work for Lambda, my
17 day-time job was to work as a prosecutor and I
18 worked on the case that led to the ending of what
19 was called under New York law the marital rape
20 exemption; and that provision of law which at one
21 time existed in all 50 states and existed until
22 1984 in New York.
23 That provision of law said
24 that a husband could not be prosecuted for raping
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1 his wife because he had a right to take what he
2 wanted.
3 This is not the ancient past.
4 Those battles are live and real and strong, but we ended
5 the legal subordination of women in this country
6 and "redefined" marriage, if you will, as a
7 commitment and relationship of equals.
8 In the fourth major change in the institution of
9 marriage, the Courts found that the government
10 has no business dictating first to married people --
11 ultimately extended to unmarried people --
12 dictating important decisions on whether or not
13 to use, for example, contraception. That case
14 was in 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut.
15 The reason I stopped to
16 mention the name of the case is because you may
17 have heard about it a little recently. It came
18 up and not just in the Lawrence case.
19 It came up when, as you may
20 remember, Senator Santorum several months ago
21 chose to make an attack on the Supreme Court in
22 the hopes of intimidating the Court from ruling
23 as they ultimately did in Lawrence. Santorum's
24 diatribe got a lot of
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25
1 attention, because he did a lot of gay bashing
2 and particularly because he went on to a riff
3 about "man on dog sex"; but in the course of that
4 tirade, Senator Santorum also attacked
5 Griswold, attacked the right to privacy,
6 attacked the Court's important role in clarifying
7 that in America decisions such as whether or not
8 to use contraception, let alone whether or not to
9 marry and whom to marry, that those decisions
10 belong to the people, not to the politicians.
11 Senator Santorum attacked that
12 principle. Yes, indeed, marriage has been a battleground
13 throughout American history.
14 Marriage remains a battle
15 ground today and gay people's freedom to marry is
16 but part of that longer arc of choice and
17 equality and separation of church and state and
18 the proper boundary between the individual and
19 the government and respect for personal
20 commitment and personal choice and the pursuit of
21 happiness as opposed to those who would impose
22 their worldview through the weapon of the
23 government on others.
24 When we stand up to fight for
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1 the freedom to marry, we stand not only for gay
2 people. We stand not only for the non-gay and
3 gay children being raised by lesbian and gay
4 parents -- children who are being punished by our
5 government for having quote/unquote the "wrong"
6 kind of parents, by having their families denied
7 the vast array of protections and
8 responsibilities that cut across every area of
9 life from Social Security to access to health
10 care to immigration to parenting rules
11 to medical decision-making.
12 Those kids, those families,
13 are denied those protections because their
14 families are denied the freedom to marry; and
15 when we stand up and fight, as we must at this
16 juncture in history, we fight for them. But we
17 fight for more than just those kids, more than
18 just gay couples, more than just those families.
19 We fight for our country's
20 commitment to equality and choice and the proper
21 respect for individual freedom and for stronger
22 communities, because what Canada has shown, what
23 Europe is finding, what countries from Taiwan to
24 South Africa to Israel to countries in South
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1 America... what they are showing the United States
2 is that a country, a jurisdiction, a place that
3 respects people's choice is a country, a place,
4 that is upholding the values that America we
5 believe stands for. And when we join in that
6 fight, we join in this historic work of keeping
7 America true to that promise.
8 Now, we have three important
9 concurrent tasks at this juncture in history.
10 There are three things we are called upon to do,
11 because this is not just a history lesson.
12 This is not just something
13 that happened in Hawaii or Vermont or
14 Massachusetts.
15 This is our country.
16 This is as live as the State of the Union, as
17 present as here in Illinois where anti-gay
18 legislators are introducing yet another set of
19 measures to write yet another layer of
20 discrimination here in this state against its
21 families.
22 This is a battle waged in
23 every corner of our country where our opponents
24 are seeking to make our country a house divided,
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1 and this civil rights moment has called us.
2 It is we who are called upon
3 to stand up now and make the difference. In
4 doing so we have three concurrent tasks, and I
5 hope that when we get to questions and answers
6 and after we hear more legal information from Pat
7 and more of the nuts and bolts of what is going
8 on here in Illinois, that we can talk directly
9 about what this group of determined, committed gay
10 and non-gay people can do in these three
11 concurrent tasks.
12 The three concurrent tasks in
13 front of our civil rights movement today are,
14 No. 1, to secure the marriage licenses in
15 Massachusetts.
16 Right now Governor Mitt Romney is
17 getting ready to pull an Orval Faubus, or for those
18 who don't know that piece of history, a George
19 Wallace.
20 Some politicians are
21 literally standing in the doorway to block loving
22 couples from crossing the threshold.
23 They are seeking to interfere
24 and delay and obfuscate and prevent the
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29
1 Constitution's clear command of equality, as
2 recognized by the Supreme Judicial Court of
3 Massachusetts, from taking effect. So that the Brown
4 v. Board of Education anniversary can receive
5 the historic acknowledgement that is so fitting, we
6 must oppose that effort to block
7 equality in Massachusetts, and we must
8 bring that victory home by supporting the
9 people in Massachusetts who are on the front
10 lines of liberty right now.
11 The second concurrent task,
12 because we have to do them together, is we must
13 in every state in the country and certainly here
14 at home in Chicago and here in Illinois, we must
15 repel attacks.
16 Whether it be the outrageous
17 notion of writing discrimination into the United
18 States Constitution for the first time ever in
19 American history to take rights away 20 and to fence a group of Americans out, or whether it be the
21 ballot measures and state constitutional
22 amendments layer upon layer
23 of discrimination being proposed in states
24 that have already enacted anti-gay and
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1 anti-marriage legislation on top of the second
2 class citizenship we already have by not being
3 able to marry -- whichever form those attacks take,
4 we must repel this concerted campaign of attack
5 that is underway state by state by state and at
6 the federal level right now.
7 The third concurrent task is
8 while doing these important pieces of work, we
9 must enlist diverse and compelling messengers to
10 tell their stories and to find their voices in
11 the public debate, the debate that we are
12 winning.
13 Why is the right wing mounting
14 this attack?
15 Why are they seeking to put
16 yet another law upon top of another law on top of
17 another law to discriminate? It is because they
18 know they are losing the discussion.
19 They are losing, because the
20 more people talk about it, the more they hear
21 what the Court in Massachusetts heard, what the
22 Courts in Canada heard, what the Court in Vermont
23 heard, what the Court in Hawaii heard. They are
24 hearing that there is no good reason for this
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1 exclusion.
2 The key to winning this
3 struggle is to fight against the attacks but most
4 of all to reach out to our neighbors; to take a
5 personal responsibility to tell our stories, have
6 our voices heard; and to ask our neighbors and
7 particularly our non-gay families, friends,
8 co-workers and neighbors to do the same.
9 The right wing is trying to
10 stampede through this attack now, because they
11 know it's their last shot, but fortunately for us
12 the more they try to stampede an attack, the more
13 people talk. If we can just withstand the
14 attack enough, that talk is what is opening
15 people's hearts and minds to allow them in
16 Lincoln's words to "think anew" and to do what they
17 have done in other junctures in American history:
18 move toward equality, inclusion, respect and
19 fairness.
20 The opponents of equality
21 cannot shut this down, because as
22 Martin Luther King said, truth pressed to earth
23 will rise again; and the truth is that ending
24 discrimination is the American thing to do.
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1 The truth is there is no good
2 reason for this discrimination. The truth is that,
3 as King said, the time is always right to do right.
4 The truth is we are winning
5 this fight. The truth is most Americans are
6 fair.
7 The truth is non-gay people
8 can be led to care and to accept and to speak out
9 in favor of equality; and if we do our work now,
10 we are the generation that will be able to say --
11 as we like to think we would have said, had we
12 lived 30 years ago, when there was another civil rights
13 moment -- we stood up and we did our part.
14 Here in Illinois, here in the
15 United States, as all around the world people are
16 doing, let's do our part. Thank you.
17 (Applause.)
18 MR. WILSON: Thank you, Evan, particularly
19 for laying a foundation and demonstrating why
20 this issue is so critical right now as well as
21 providing all of us with an overview of what we
22 can do.
23 I want to underscore one
24 important thing that personally is very
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1 informative, and that is the role that family and
2 friends can play in understanding just what is at
3 stake.
4 I think that it's critical
5 from my own experience understanding when people
6 realize that you can get married and contrary to
7 the Congress in 1996, former President Clinton or
8 Bush under his current what he calls Marriage
9 Protection Week, there is no need to defend
10 marriage from us.
11 I think that the battle ground
12 is going to be waged in the families and the
13 friends of all of us who see that this is no more
14 threatening to their relationships or their
15 livelihood or their rights to participate fully
16 as Americans as anything else, and I think that
17 is welcome.
18 I would like to now introduce
19 Pat Logue, who is senior counsel and recently interim legal director for
20 Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.
21 Pat has been very active in
22 all of this over the years and is going to
23 provide us all with an understanding of some of
24 the legal issues that are at stake.
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1 MS. LOGUE: I first want to join in
2 thanking everyone who helped put this together
3 from Jenner & Block and the Bar Associations and
4 thank my friend, Evan, for coming out here.
5 It's “the truth” that Evan is a
6 hard act to follow, but I will do my best; and my
7 goal here is to fill in some of the legal stuff,
8 a little bit of the details.
9 I want to just point out that
10 in the back are all of my colleagues from
11 Lambda Legal, my current colleagues who have done
12 a tremendous amount of work on this issue,
13 including leading up to our Freedom to Marry
14 event on February 12th which should be really
15 fun. I hope people can turn out for that.
16 There is a tremendous amount
17 of material on our web site as well that you
18 should take a look at if you can – www.lambdalegal.org.
19 I thought I would structure my
20 remarks around some of the fundamental
21 misconceptions that a lot of people in the world
22 have.
23 It was interesting to me when
24 we won the sodomy case how many straight
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1 friends came and said, "I had no idea there were
2 any laws like this anywhere in the country. This
3 is ridiculous."
4 Likewise, with marriage there
5 seems to be a fundamental misconception that we
6 can get married somewhere in the United States,
7 and it seems to always be Hawaii. Sorry. We
8 didn't quite prevail there. We took our best
9 shot. But no, there is no where that we can get
10 married in the United States.
11 So I am going to talk about
12 where we are with that legally. There is another
13 misconception out there that gay people really
14 don't need marriage. We could just write a
15 couple documents. What is the big deal? So we
16 will talk a little bit about that.
17 And then this newer thing
18 about “isn't civil union good enough,” or "Why
20 do you have to call it marriage? What is
21 the big deal?" Given
22 Bill's absence, I will also talk a little bit about
23 Lawrence.
24 So while I look forward to revising
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1 this statistic, still we can't get married
2 anywhere in the United States, even though the
3 last census showed that same sex couples live in
4 over 99 percent of the counties in our country --
5 and I am quite sure in those other counties there
6 were some people that went uncounted -- hundreds of
7 thousands of self-reporting gay and lesbian
8 couples to a federal government that doesn't
9 exactly encourage self-reporting on such things.
10 A large percentage of us have
11 children at home that we raise, of course, as
12 well as anyone else.
13 So our claim to this is really
14 no different from the claims of anyone else who
15 wants at least the opportunity to marry, wants to
16 make that decision for themselves.
17 I want to talk a little bit
18 about the Goodridge case. Goodridge is such a
19 ray of light.
20 The Massachusetts Court got it
21 in a way that it is just a refreshing breath of
22 fresh air and common sense in dealing with what
23 are some really flawed arguments that the other
24 side makes and also with some really difficult
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1 legal and social issues that come into play here.
2 It invokes Lawrence. It
3 invokes Troxel, but it really invokes the history
4 of Massachusetts, their own protection of gay and
5 lesbian rights over the years, their own really
6 strong constitutional commitment to equality.
7 They just put out there that
8 civil marriage, what we are talking about here, is
9 a wholly secular institution. You do not need to
10 go to a church or synagogue to get married in
11 this country and we shouldn’t confuse what’s at issue.
12 They remind us marriage is at once an intensely personal
13 and intimate act, but also a very public act,
14 something that through doing it integrates you
15 into the social fabric of our country
16 in a way that nothing else does.
17 The benefits of the
18 institution of marriage really touch
19 everything on the road from life to death, and
20 they just lay this out there in a way that if you
21 haven't had a chance to read this or if you have
22 straight friends who are lawyers who really want
23 to get caught up, have them read this decision.
24 It invokes the Loving case and
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1 Perez, the California state decision that in 1948
2 was the first decision to roll back the
3 prohibitions against interracial marriage.
4 Goodridge says that the
5 marriage exclusion does not even survive even the
6 most deferential form of “rational basis” scrutiny
7 for you lawyers out there.
8 They didn't have to get into
9 the high and mighty question about strict
10 scrutiny or compelling justification.
11 It can't meet the lowest level
12 of scrutiny. The decision rejects the contention that there
13 is some connection between procreation and
14 marriage in our country.
15 There are no tests of
16 sterility and ability or desire to procreate
17 to get married in our country.
18 It takes apart the connection
19 that is sometimes drawn between heterosexual marriage and
20 children.
21 Massachusetts, one of the
22 longstanding states for second parent adoption
23 and equal treatment of parents of gay and lesbian
24 children, has a lot of experience to draw on and
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1 rejects the notion that gay and lesbian families are not good for children.
2 The court construes civil marriage to be the voluntary
3 union of two persons as spouses to the exclusion
4 of all others.
5 And my favorite line, "We
6 declare that barring an individual from the
7 protections, benefits and obligations of civil
8 marriage solely because that person would marry a
9 person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts
10 Constitution."
11 They get this other key point
12 that I think is obscured sometimes because we use the language of “same
13 sex marriage” and “equal marriage” and all this – that
14 it's about marrying the person that you love.
15 That is what it's about.
16 I am a little tired of being
17 told “what do you mean you don't have equal
18 marriage rights, you can marry any man you want.
19 What is the big deal?”
20 It's about marrying the person we love,
21
22 the one irreplaceable person that you have
23 fallen in love with and want to marry; and that is
24 what this is about.
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1 When we talk about liberty and
2 intimacy and privacy and equality, that is what
3 we are talking about. I should be able to marry my partner
4 , if I so choose.
5 You should be able to marry
6 your partner and not “someone from List A.”
7 (Laughter.)
8 MS. LOGUE: So, hopefully, as I have said,
9 this will come about in May 2004 in
10 Massachusetts.
11 There is this sort of side
12 show going on right now, the advisory opinion
13 action, where the Senate of Massachusetts has
14 gone to the Court for an advisory opinion, which
15 is actually quite common in Massachusetts unlike
16 most states; and they want permission in advance
17 from the Court to say “what about if in response
18 to your ruling that says you cannot exclude same
19 sex couples from marriage, we were to pass a law
20 that said, ‘Same sex couples are excluded from
21 the institution of marriage, but we will give
22 them civil unions.’ Would that satisfy your
23 decision?"
24 There has just been a lot of
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1 briefing on that. Lambda participated in an
2 amicus in the Goodridge decision and also in this
3 action just reinforcing to the court the tradition of not
5 accepting so-called separate but equal solutions in our
6 country; and we hope that the advisory opinion side show
7 will go by the way side.
8 And in -- what is it now, 120days or so,
9 Massachusetts will start the process of
10 marrying people and joining with Canada in
11 broadening access to this right in North America.
12 Also, out there in New Jersey, is
13 Lambda's challenge on behalf of seven couples. We
14 lost in the trial court in the fall, which --
15 well, I will just move on from there to say we
16 are now in the intermediate appellate court in
17 New Jersey.
18 We are briefing away trying to
19 digest what seem to be daily developments on
20 this issue and work them into that case.
21 I have to say a bit about the
22 cases that have gone before in Hawaii and Alaska, both
23 examples of successful rulings followed by
24 constitutional amendments.
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1 We can't underestimate the
2 power of the other side to get majority support
3 for laws and constitutional amendments that would
4 try to deprive us of this right, what is starting to
5 be a usual rather than an unusual technique of just changing the rules
6 and applying a hammer to squelch all discussion,
7 trying to take care of the issues all at once.
8 There is this notion that somehow
9 they can consistently say “well, this is a state
10 by state issue and we leave it to the states;” but
11 as soon as one state grants this, it’s “we need a
12 federal constitutional amendment, because we must stop that
13 judicial activism.”
14 Where would we be with civil
15 rights without what they call “judicial activism,” which really
16 just means fulfilling a fundamental judicial role, of course,
17 of enforcing the constitution.
18 The second fundamental
19 misconception out there is that we don't need
20 marriage to protect our relationships and
21 families, and while I don't want to deprive any of you
22 of business if you are domestic relations
23 lawyers, there is only so much you can do.
24 Please, please do a will. Don't say “I'll do it
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1 next week.” Do a will. Do powers of attorney.
2 Do guardianships if that is in your life plan, for
3 yourself and your children. Do second parent
4 adoption if you have that option.
5 Do these things. But let's
6 acknowledge that there is only so much you can
7 do.
8 There are more than a thousand
9 federal benefits tied to marriage. There are
10 hundreds of benefits in Illinois tied to
11 marriage. Your paychecks reflect deductions
12 every month for Social Security.
13 You are paying for other
14 people to get death benefits when their spouse
15 dies.
16 We are paying for other
17 people to get pension benefits when their spouses
18 die or retire, and these are things that no
19 amount of agreements that I can take into court
20 with my partner are going to help with.
21 Those agreements, of course,
22 as we have seen, only go as far as they go. They are subject to
23 revocation, subject to dishonor. We had this
24 difficult case of this guy who traveled across
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1 country with his partner, armed with a perfectly
2 valid power of attorney; but when his partner
3 needed care in Maryland, the hospital wouldn't
4 honor it, and maybe it was just a bureaucratic
5 error, but what happened in six hours, the six
6 hours it took for his partner's family to arrive
7 to say he should be let in, his partner slipped
8 into a coma.
9 He died shortly thereafter and they
10 never got to say goodbye, let alone exercise
11 those powers of attorney. So do them, but we
12 cannot stop there. We can't stop there.
13 The third fundamental
14 misconception, I guess, that is out there now is
15 that civil union is the same thing; and civil
16 unions are a regularly available thing.
17 There is no doubt that civil
18 unions are a good thing, but they are not
19 equality, and they are not marriage.
20 Let me just talk a little bit
21 about that.
22 People say “why do you go after marriage equality?
23 What about domestic partnership.”
24 First, I have said for many years that
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1 what Evan is doing -- and this man is truly a
2 hero -- but what Evan is doing and what Lambda
3 Legal is doing to seek marriage equality is the
4 surest way to secure domestic partner benefits
5 and civil union. It’s all connected.
6 There is no doubt in my mind
7 that if you are not reaching for true equality,
8 you will not be getting people to move along the
9 continuum even as far as they are.
10 We would not have civil unions
11 in Vermont without a challenge to the marriage
12 policy.
13 We wouldn't have registered
14 domestic partnerships in California without the
15 pressing of thousands of gay people there for marriagey.
16 We wouldn't have what they
17 call reciprocal beneficiary laws in Hawaii.
18 One thing leads to another when you make the case
20 for, equality but none of those should be confused with true equality.
21 So even if we’ve had improvements
22 in the landscape, we don't have what other people
23 have.
24 The thing about civil union,
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1 -- and this is another example or parallel to the
2 first misconception about all the places we
3 can get married -- people seem to think that civil
4 unions are widely available. ‘Why don't you just
5 go get a civil union?”
6 They can register us in Cook
7 County, which is very nice, but only Vermont has
8 this thing called civil union. By the way you don't need
9 a residency requirement to go there.
10 You don't need a residency
11 requirement to go to Canada and get married. In
12 both cases there are residency requirements for
13 divorce. I just wanted to point that out. Just
14 in case. You never know. Sometimes things don't
15 go right.
16 But a civil union is only a
17 parallel structure. We call it separate, but not truly
18 equal. It is an attempt by the State of Vermont at a
19 political compromise,
20 It attempts to give all the state
21 based incidents of marriage to same sex couples,
22 within Vermont and it does do mostly that; but what Vermont cannot do
23 is make that institution portable across state
24 lines.
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1 What it cannot do is insert
2 the words “civil union” where the word “marriage”
3 appears in thousands of laws and policies in our country.
4 It cannot -- and God forbid, because
5 we are in a mobile environment, you got
6 transferred from Burlington to the City of
7 Chicago – because Vermont cannot guarantee that the great
8 officials of our State will see you as anything
9 more than an unmarried couple with no legal
10 relationship whatsoever.
11 So I don't want to belittle
12 it, because it's really an important advance, but
13 separate but equal is inherently unequal.
14 The other piece of it is
15 that -- and Evan touched on this a lot --
16 it's about exclusion. There’s a
17 profound statement of inequality, personal
18 inequality, in the whole notion that we need
19 separate institutions
20 .
21 It's not even like there were civil
22 unions already and someone brought a marriage challenge and
23 they said, "Well, we have civil unions, that is
24 good enough.” It was “Let's come up with something
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1 totally different. We are so scared, we are so
2 unwilling to include you.”
3 “We are so unwilling to say
4 that you are as worthy of this as we are, that we
5 are going to go out of our way to create an
6 entirely separate thing,” And it excludes us not
7 just from the institution, but from the language
8 of marriage.
9 I am not big on rhetorical
10 stuff, but this is really important. Think about
11 what it means when someone says to you they are
12 married.
13 Think about all the things
14 that go into this in our cuilture -- maybe you had this from your
15 parents, the urging in our society of people to
16 get married, the emphasis on marriage, marriage, marriage and
17 what that means in everyday social life.
18 Have you tried to tell someone
19 “I am civil unionized?”
20 (Laughter.)
21 MS. LOGUE: And “I am a registered partner.”
22 (Laughter.)
23 MS. LOGUE: These are good things, but it
24 doesn't convey it. It just begins a conversation
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1 instead of taking you along to the shared social
2 understanding of what your relationship is about.
3 There are some problems with
4 marriage in this country. We are talking in
5 ideals. We are talking about having the same
6 rights and decisions that others have.
7 But we can't deny as some people
8 try to do that there is a fundamental difference in whether
9 you have that access or not. You can't just create a second
10 institution and pretend that it's the same thing.
11 The Court said in Goodridge,
12 "Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal
13 commitment to another human being and a highly
14 public celebration of the ideals of mutuality,
15 companionship, intimacy, fidelity and family."
16 And then, quoting Griswold, "’It is an
17 association that promotes a way of life, not
18 causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths;
19 a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects.’
20 Because it fulfills yearnings for
21 security, safe haven, and connection that express
22 our common humanity, civil marriage is an
23 esteemed institution and the decision whether and
24 whom to marry is among life's momentous acts of
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1 self-definition."
2 I would like to think those
3 are the words of a court that is not about to
4 back down from equal marriage rights and
5 hopefully, as Evan said, we will soon have
6 many more gay people in our country who get
7 married and this notion that the world is going
8 to fall apart will hopefully lose some of its
9 steam.
10 Let me talk a little bit about
11 Lawrence. I am really sorry that Bill
12 Hohengarten couldn't be here to talk about that.
13 I don't know how many of you
14 were here on June 23rd when Paul Smith and I were
15 here to talk about Lawrence, what we thought
16 would be the last possible day for a decision.
17 And then it was decided three days later, so we
18 had to come up with something to say.
19 Paul Smith's argument in the
20 case was just extraordinary, and Jenner &
21 Block's work on the case was just extraordinary.
22 Bill Hohengarten was our
23 eloquent draftsperson, the major writer of our
24 briefs. Of course, we all contributed. I am
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1 just really sorry that he couldn't be here. He
2 is very thoughtful on these issues.
3 The Goodridge case draws
4 positively on Lawrence. I must point out that the
5 Standhardt case, a case that is currently on
6 appeal in Arizona on marriage rights that so far
7 have been denied also draws on Lawrence,
8 wrongly in my opinion, saying basically that
9 it is not even relevant to marriage equality.
10 The trial court in Lewis, our New
11 Jersey case, produced something like an 80-page
12 opinion with one passing mention of Lawrence.
14 There is something in Lawrence,
15 in Justice Kennedy's opinion for everyone.
16 Justices Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor went out
17 of their way to distinguish the case in front of
18 them from marriage, each having.
19 some sentence in there to the effect that
20 we are not deciding marriage today.
21
22 Let me just step back and say that every amicus
24 brief in support of Texas in this case basically
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1 said briefly:
2 “You should keep the Texas
3 sodomy law, and now here's 15 pages on why you
4 should not grant equal marriage rights.”
5 This whole emphasis coming out of Lawrence and
6 the events of the summer, the “backlash,” are part of a very
7 orchestrated plan by our opponents to turn all of
8 this into a line in the sand discussion about marriage.
9 And in the end, and ironically, it's
11 Justice Scalia, who says this decision is all about marriage,
12 who says you have already won that issue today.
13 I think he is at least correct that
14 the opinion is really quite helpful for equal
15 marriage rights, even though there is a very
16 strong sense of “don't be hurrying back here any
17 time soon." .
18 Lawrence v. Texas was a substantive due
19 process ruling, a liberty ruling, a privacy
20 ruling. The Court is usually hard on those
21 cases, and the big door closer is “we are not
22 creating any new fundamental rights in this country.”
23 Marriage though is already one of
24 those recognized fundamental rights. So we may
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1 well see a case one day that comes back somewhat
2 in the posture that Lawrence came, which is
3 basically if we understand what this right is really
4 about, we have to understand that it has to be
5 available on equal terms to everyone.
6 In the Hardwick case, as Evan
7 said, it was called “facetious” to think of fundamental
8 rights of sexual intimacy that included the homosexual side of it.
9 In Lawrence the Court
10 understood -- Justice Kennedy understood -- that the
11 claim in Lawrence was about liberty for all, about spatial
12 and more transcendental aspects of privacy for all, about our rights
13 of intimacy, our right to have a space free from
14 government, our right to make decisions free from
15 government.
16 I often wonder how government
17 got into the business of marriage, but it’s there and our right
18 to make some decisions for ourselves and to keep
19 the government out of those decisions – such as who to marry and
20 to be intimate with – is strongly reinforced in Lawrence. So if it comes in that
21 posture, of course, of vindicating liberty for all you can expect us to make
22 those connections between the two frameworks.
23 It may come one day in the form of just pure
24 equal protection, i.e., “You can’t exclude us from what
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1 you grant everyone else.”
2 And here we encounter these
3 arguments that marriage is “by definition” the union of
5 a man and a woman; and, therefore, you are not
6 similarly situated to people who want to get
7 “married” because you don't want to
8 enter into something that is between a man and
9 woman. You are trying to do something else,
10 which involves someone of the same sex.
11 Therefore, you are not talking about equal entry
12 into the same institution. You are talking
13 something entirely different, and we don't
14 recognize that."
15 There are a lot of people in
16 the country, we have to understand, who really do
17 fundamentally think that what we are asking for
18 is something different from what they have and
19 the choices that they make. But of course it is the state that
defines who can marry, as it defines who can practice
law or sit at a lunch counter, and in the end equality is
not going to be held captive to discriminatory definitions.
20 I want to share just a few bits from the
21 majority opinion in Lawrence that I think are really
22 important.
23 First, that it was based in a
24 very modern understanding of liberty, not just
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1 what was etched in stone when the 14th Amendment
2 or the original constitution was passed, but
3 looking really at what is happening over time in the states, which is
4 frankly a lot of why so much energy is put in by
5 our opponents to have these state laws passed that try to
6 emphasize that they won't want us to marry.
7 But it also goes beyond that and
8 looks at the notion of liberty in a much more
9 fundamental way. It's not just tracking and
10 keeping score of who is willing to give who what
11 rights, but what is it that we as a free people
12 expect to be left up to individuals to decide for ourselves.
13 “At the heart of liberty are
14 intimate and personal choices central to the
15 dignity and autonomy of the person,” specifically
16 mentioning marriage, procreation, contraception,
17 family relationships, child rearing and education
18 and saying -- and I quote, "Persons in a
19 homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for
20 these purposes just as heterosexual persons do.” This certainly
21 suggests that there is something to be made
22 of the decision in the marriage context, as in Goodridge. Over time
23 we are going to figure that out.
24 I do want to emphasize that
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1 the New Jersey case and the Massachusetts case,
2 are only proceeding on
3 state constitutional grounds.
4 We are trying to work within
5 the traditional understanding of our country that
6 marriage and family law is drawn on a
7 state-by-state basis, and we should ask the
8 states to do this under their own laws.
9 One day this will become a
10 federal issue. One day a married couple will run
11 into DOMA, the federal law that says your
12 marriages will not be recognized.
13 One day someone may have to
14 file a tax return and not know what to say, and
15 will have no choice but to go to federal
16 court, but we counsel patience.
17 I think sometimes when
18 people come into this issue for the first time,
19 they get a fearfulness about “you are trying to do
20 so much so fast. Can't you see that there is all this
21 backlash, stop, stop.” And really we have been at
22 this a long time, a long time. We have been patient.
23 Evan personally has been at
24 this more than a decade. There were cases 20, 30
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1 years ago. We have only filed at Lambda Legal
2 two affirmative marriage cases. Listening to people you would think
3 we were suing in every court in the country.
4 We have been patient, and we
5 continue to be patient and we continue to be
6 strategic and to focus on public education.
7 We continue to weigh the
8 dangers that are out there, but we have to continue to
9 move forward; and I can't emphasize this enough and I
10 will repeat Evan's three things there at the end.
11 We need to secure those marriage licenses in
12 Massachusetts. Why? Because we need more
13 married people walking around among us, not so
14 much among the gay community, although that is
15 important, but among our friends. We need our
16 friends to wake up and realize what is going on
17 out there.
18 We need to repel the attacks
19 in Congress and every state in the country. If
20 it hasn't happened yet, it will be happening
21 soon.
22 It's important that we are
23 heard and that it becomes if not a majority, at
24 least the sense that there is nothing to be
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1 gained politically by going down this road.
2 We do need to enlist the
3 divergent and compelling voices to tell these
4 stories to broaden the message, to broaden the
5 messengers to show that like minded reasonable
6 people who vote in addition to us support this.
7 I was really pleased to see in
8 the wake of Goodridge just an upsurge in the
9 number of op eds, the number of letters
10 to the editor from people who really should have been
11 attuned to this maybe for a long time, but
12 obviously were coming to a new deeper
13 understanding of what is going on, and people are
14 saying, "What is the big deal?" Give equality.
15 So many straight people are
16 coming forward to say, "We don't need to defend
17 my marriage by denying yours. There is nothing to defend. We
18 will be fine."
19 Lambda Legal and Freedom to Marry can't go
20 it alone. First we ask you to support our
21 organizations, but mostly we ask you to go out
22 there and do that work, the one-on-one work of
23 coming out at a new level about your relationship
24 and about your support for marriage equality.
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1 I think we are ready for
2 questions and answers.
3 (Applause.)
4 MR. WILSON: Thanks, Pat.
5 I think it’s a testament to Lambda's
6 work, the State of New Jersey where they have
7 been very active for a number of years on the
8 local level where the town halls, schools have
9 all been part of an education movement, I think
10 the latest opinion polls are 59 of people
13 consistently polled are in favor of equal
14 marriage rights throughout the State of New
15 Jersey.
16 MS. LOGUE: It is similar in polls in
17 Massachusetts.
18 MR. WOLFSON: And in Massachusetts, and
19 you see also in the National polls that the
20 number of people who tend to either oppose it are
21 people who believe in marriage per se or
22 religious institution or it comes from the church
23 and not from the State much more heavily oppose
24 the idea and people who are either older or have
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1 not had any personal exposure when the polls go
2 further and ask the people whether they know
3 anybody who has been situated.
4 I think the last New York
5 Times poll had the last question was know
6 homosexual, as in k-n-o-w and I think only 47
7 percent owned up to it, but it does play a role.
8 I think it is education, and I
9 think, as Pat says, it's vocabulary.
10 It is a question people don't
11 know how to talk about these things, and part of
12 it is because the word marriage is something that
13 people just -- we all I think intuitively have an
14 image of what it is, part of that socialization
15 and certainly a lot of it has to do with American
16 culture and pop culture.
17 I would like now to turn it
18 over to questions, and please feel free to ask a
19 question.
20 If you would stand, sure. Go
21 ahead just so everybody can hear and identify
22 yourself for the record.
23 MR. CASTILLO: The first part is a
24 statement. The second part is a question. My
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1 name is Robert Castillo.
2 I am a member of the City's
3 Advisory Council on Lesbian Gay Bisexual and
4 Transgendered issues.
5 This past Wednesday the
6 Council passed a resolution condemning both the
7 federal marriage amendment and the proposed State
8 constitution in the amendments.
9 The second thing we actually
10 did was to approve the letter to President Bush
11 concerning the State of the Union address about
12 the mention of the marriage amendment as well as
13 abstinence only program and how they impact
14 GLBT's who can't wait, because there is no marriage
15 for you.
16 My question is considering the
17 existence of DOMA, will that be used if
18 Massachusetts does grant marriage license, will
19 that be used to hamper your decision or will that
20 then be used to go ahead and challenge DOMA?
21 MR. WOLFSON: The question is about the
22 federal anti-marriage law passed in 1996, the
23 so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" or DOMA.
24 Just to take a moment to remind people of what
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1 that law is, its most important element was to
2 say that from now on for the first time in
3 American history, the federal government will not
4 follow the State's lead with regard to family
5 relations and particularly marriage, but instead
6 we will now have in the United States a caste
7 system of marriage.
8 Under so-called DOMA, we have first-class marriages
9 for people whose marriages the federal government
10 likes, and those people get all of the
11 protections, benefits and responsibilities under
12 federal law in all circumstances. As Pat
13 mentioned, there are well over 1,049 -- the federal General
14 Accounting Office actually stopped counting at
15 1,049, because there are too many ways in which
16 marriage connects to the federal law.
17 For people whose marriages the
18 federal government doesn't like, for the first
19 time in American history, we now have second-
20 class marriages; and those marriages, though
21 lawful, will get none of the protections,
22 benefits and responsibilities under federal law
23 and no matter what the circumstances, no matter
24 where, no matter what is at stake.
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1 The only people who qualify
2 for the category of second-class marriage are gay couples, the
3 people in America who unlike prisoners can't get
4 married.
5 So that is what the federal
6 anti-marriage law does. What it did not do is
7 say that states may not end this discrimination.
8 What it did also was say
9 that if a state does legally marry people, other
10 states may choose to disrespect or not honor that
11 lawful marriage.
12 So, this federal
13 discriminatory piece of legislation
14 is
15 purporting to change normal rules under which our
16 country operates whereby states honor the lawful
17 marriages, the lawful unions, the laws and
18 decisions and the judgments of other states, part
19 of our national unity.
20 The federal anti-marriage law
21 of DOMA has not been challenged because you can't
22 go into court and say that my marriage is being
23 discriminated against until you have one; and
24 since up until recently, same sex couples were
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1 not able to legally marry anywhere in the world.
2 Only in 2000 did the first country, the
3 Netherlands, end marriage discrimination
4 followed by a second country in Europe, Belgium.
5 Others are on the way, and now Canada.
6 Now, in Massachusetts the
7 prospect of same-sex couples getting legally
8 married is on the horizon as if we do our work of
9 defending that civil rights triumph.
10 Some people immediately go to
11 where the questioner went, and ask
12 will there be challenges to the federal
13 anti-marriage law, this discriminatory radical
14 piece of legislation, once people are allowed to
15 marry? I think in the course of time there
16 almost certainly will be challenges to that law.
17 But I want to point out that
18 people should not immediately rush to that point,
19 because our country actually has a much longer
20 history of figuring out how to address these
21 kinds of questions, and that is the law of
22 marriage and the law of how to treat marriages
23 that has been developed between the states.
24 For more than 200 years of
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1 American history the states have worked out among
2 themselves how they are going to honor other
3 state's marriages, and in virtually every case,
4 over 200 plus years -- when I was at
5 Lambda, my colleagues and I read all of those
6 cases -- in virtually every case, no matter what
7 the state said it was going to do, no matter how
8 much it was discriminating itself in marriage,
9 when faced with a married couple, a real-life
10 family, in a real-life circumstance, in virtually
11 every instance, the state chose for its own
12 policy reasons to honor the marriage, because
13 there are better policy arguments for honoring
14 and respecting families than there are for
15 disrespecting and destabilizing a marriage. The
16 states made those decisions without a federal
17 constitutional standard, without federal
18 constitutional intervention, without many federal
19 court cases at all, though there are a handful in
20 American history.
21 So once marriage
22 discrimination ends in some state, other states'
23 businesses, people will now be looking not at a
24 hypothetical, but a reality, a real family in a
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1 real situation; and the general practice, the
2 general principle, the general standard of law
3 not via the Constitution but in law itself will
4 be in favor in general of honoring the marriages.
5 At the same time we know that
6 some states, some businesses and for a time, as I
7 said earlier, the federal government will
8 discriminate against those marriages. There
9 will be a patchwork in which there will be court
10 cases, legislative discussions, and growing public
11 awareness that the Federal government is beating
12 up on a legally married couple, and that is the
13 discussion we look forward to having, not only in
14 court but in the public arena of the years to
15 come.
16 MR. WILSON: Next question.
17 AN UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Usually
18 when I see this argument, it is about equal
19 protection under the law and privacy and
20 freedoms.
21 I rarely hear it argued
22 against because really when it comes down to it,
23 it's an establishment of a national religion and
24 unconstitutional on that basis because you are
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1 being denied civil benefits under the government
2 because you are ineligible for some religious
3 ceremony in most religions, and it just seems
4 like we can't adopt children because we are
5 sinners kind of in the federal government's eyes.
6 Is that something that people
7 have looked at or is that really not good
8 arguments against it?
9 MS. LOGUE: Well, first of all, it is safe
10 to say we have looked at everything.
11 (Laughter.)
12 MS. LOGUE: It certainly has religious
13 elements, but it's not really for the most part
14 focusing on these issues.
15 We are not challenging the
16 right of religions to marry people, and there is
17 no requirement for civil marriage in this
18 country that a religion approve it.
19 We are challenging the access
20 to civil marriage in our country, and certainly
21 marriage is an important dimension in the lives
22 of many religions and to some extent marriage
23 inequality reflects the traditions of many
24 religions, but I don't think it's correct or
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1 helpful as a First Amendment issue to
2 equate civil with religious marriage. There are many religions who marry
3 us.
4 There are many religions who
5 are embracing and affirming our relationships,
6 and I just think it's a mistake to think of it in
7 terms of religion on one side and gay people on
8 the other.
9 AN UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: To
10 clarify, the government is going to enforce our
11 religious ideal of saying that marriage is a man
12 and a woman, because really that is the only
13 argument that there is that it must be a man and
14 a woman is religious ones; and the federal
15 government is going to enforce a religious ideal.
16 MR. WOLFSON: You are right, that a lot of
17 the opponents of equality and the opponents of
18 ending discrimination in marriage will refer to
19 religion or their particular religions' views, and
20 they talk about a quote/unquote "sanctity" of
21 marriage or the sacrament of marriage, which some
22 religions believe very deeply and others do not.
23 And then they muddle that into
24 a discussion about what the government should be
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1 doing with regard to legal or civil marriage
2 licenses. In reality,
3 we are talking here about legal
4 civil marriage licenses and the proper argument
5 to defend what the government does has to be
6 made on a secular basis. The fact of the
7 matter is that a lot of the language of our
8 opponents tries to blur that line.
9 So you are correct in pointing
10 out the need to be clear about the difference. You are also correct in
11 highlighting the fact that there are many
12 religious leaders, many faiths, many
13 congregations that do indeed perform religious
14 marriages of same sex unions, although the law
15 treats those religiously married equals as
16 nothing more than legal strangers; but at the end
17 of the day as a legal matter in terms of
18 constitutional and legal argument, this is not
19 about religious marriage.
20 It is about legal marriage,
21 and the courts would not say that just because
22 the government is restricting marriage that way
23 that necessarily is a religious imposition.
24 Because they would analyze in secular terms so
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1 must we engage in secular terms.
2 AN UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi.
3
4 My question to you, Pat, is
5 does Lambda have any preference if we were to get
6 married as to how we fill out forms, in other
7 words, if we flew to Massachusetts in June and
8 got married, would Lambda have any preference as
9 to whether we should file as a married couple tax
10 forms and those types of things, or is that just
11 irrelevant at this point?
12 MS. LOGUE: Well, the question was whether
13 Lambda has a preference if people represent
14 themselves as married, once married in
15 Massachusetts or Canada or wherever on things
16 like tax forms.
17 Preferences notwithstanding,
18 it's really a legal question.
19 On the one hand, I would think
20 the most important thing is that in life and in
21 social interactions you need to not shy away from
22 identifying yourself as married, even though I couldn't
23 sit here as a lawyer knowing some of these
24 anti-marriage laws out there and safely say to
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1 you, always do it this way and there will never
2 be any repercussion.
3 You have to account for the
4 fact that some people do not view your marriage
5 as valid, but there are ways you can consistently
6 represent yourself as married. I can’t take into
7 account here the specifics of what any one person
8 should do in any one state on aparticular
9 legal issue.
10 I am not going to get into it
11 for obvious reasons, but it's a little bit of a
12 problem because you are married once you get
13 married; but if Illinois doesn't consider you
14 married, there is a lot of extra effort that goes
15 in socially and legally to preserving your
16 integrity.
17 MR. WILSON: So that everybody
18 understands, Illinois amended its marriage laws
19 in '96 when the Federal government passed DOMA to
20 specifically define marriage as a union between a
21 man and a woman.
22 It was one of like 30-some
23 states that had no distinction in the law that it
24 never qualified.
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1 It also passed a reciprocal
2 law that said it's the public policy of the state
3 that marriages between persons of the same sex
4 violates state public policy, and it went one
5 step further and said that persons who obtain
6 such marriages in other jurisdictions are
7 classified among so-called prohibited marriages
8 under the divorce act, which specifies what
9 marriages are acceptable.
10 So it said citizens of this
11 state who go elsewhere and obtain a marriage
12 which would not be allowed here, that is another
13 class of marriage.
14 Those are the hurdles in
15 Illinois, and now two representatives 10 days ago
16 introduced an amendment to the State constitution
17 to specifically provide that under the
18 constitution of IllinoisIit's illegal as well.
19 MR. WOLFSON: Let me just add, Richard is
20 correct in everything he is saying, as is Pat;
21 and I will add the fact that there was a period
22 of time, a very long period of time in our
23 country's history, where there were many states
24 that refused to allow people who were in
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1 interracial couples to marry; and some of them
2 went so far -- further than even Illinois has done
3 in Richard's explanation -- making it a crime to
4 marry someone of quote/unquote the "wrong" race;
5 and nevertheless in most of the cases in which
6 those states were confronted with an actual
7 married couple who had gotten legally married in
8 other states and who were an interracial couple,
9 they would still honor that marriage, even though
10 in their own state to marry someone of
11 quote/unquote the "wrong" race was a crime.
12 So the real answer here and no
13 matter how many versions of the question Pat or
14 Richard or any other lawyers get asked, the real
15 answer is that for a period of time there will be
16 a patchwork of discrimination on the one hand and
17 respect on the other with a lot of uncertainty.
18 That is just how it is going
19 to play out -- just as it did under interracial
20 marriage, just as it did with divorce, just as it
21 has in other episodes in American constitutional
22 life.
23 And so if you are not the kind
24 of couple that can deal with uncertainty, then
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1 you have to think seriously about whether you are
2 ready to enter into marriage at this time given
3 the house divided that our opponents have made
4 America.
5 But, on the other hand, if you
6 are the kind of couple that can deal with that
7 mix of respect, discrimination, and uncertainty,
8 and want to have the opportunity to make your
9 statement because you love each other and you
10 want the world to know and you can deal with that
11 uncertainty, then you have a contribution to
12 make, not necessarily by litigating, not
13 necessarily by fighting every act of
14 discrimination, but by telling the story and
15 showing the face and allowing fair-minded people
16 to think anew.
17 MR. WILSON: Yes.
18 MR. WALTERS: I am kind of thinking in a
19 way the kind of context for test and error.
20 I think if we are able to get
21 civil unions, where I am able to see my partner
22 in the hospital, we are able to make decisions,
23 we are able to adopt children.
24 In other words, you brought up
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1 earlier the religious issue for a lot of people.
2 Marriage is considered religious things. If we
3 get a civil union that is outside of that, it is
4 very much the same as it would be if you went and
5 got a judge; and we have a very hot election
6 coming up.
7 We have an issue there that is
8 going to fire up a lot, and the Supreme Court has
9 several members that very well could resign in
10 the next term and very well even reverse that
11 decision. It is not all that etched in stone.
12 What I am wondering is: Isn't
13 it better to in some ways tone down the rhetoric
14 that go for more practical civil unions and
15 things and see that they can actually raise
16 children and be responsible families and not feed
17 right into the religious or Republicans right now
18 on this marriage issue, which they are going to
19 make a very hot issue in the next election.
20 MR. WILSON: Could you identify yourself?
21 MR. WALTERS: I am Bill Walters. I
22 actually deal with criminal law, but I do follow
23 this issue
24 MR. WILSON: Thank you.
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1 MS. LOGUE: Did everyone hear the
2 question?
3 THE AUDIENCE: No.
4 MS. LOGUE: Basically should we tone it
5 down a bit, settle for civil unionsnow
6 particularly with the election pending, and
7 et cetera, which is I think a very responsible
8 question; and these are difficult jobs that we
9 have, I just want to say.
10 It is not easy to navigate any
11 of these issues in ways that don't draw a lot of
12 fire.
13 There is no mistaking that you
14 cannot go through this issue without backlash.
15 You cannot take on this issue
16 without drawing the battle that we have drawn at
17 some point, and we shouldn't take ourselves out
18 just because it's an election year.
19 It is something we are going
20 to have to go through. Having said that, I think
21 that there is a lot to be gained right now by
22 continuing to talk that may be not possible to
23 gain in any other environment.
24 There is an attention to this
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1 issue. There is an opportunity to tell what we
2 are really talking about with people listening in
3 a way that we haven't had consistently for a very
4 long time.
5 I don't know about toning down
6 the rhetoric. I feel like our message is really
7 from the heart. I don't see a lot of fireworks.
8 I don't see a lot of throwing
9 of Molotov cocktails or whatnot. As I said,
10 Lambda has one affirmative case pending. GLAD has one case
11 pending.
12 We are trying to go about this
13 in the most responsible way possibly centering
14 those cases around really well-developed
15 education campaigns, that if you look in those
16 states, are having the effect of changing public
17 opinion.
18 So it's difficult because I
19 think you can't control all the forces out there.
20 If George Bush and his minions really want a
21 federal marriage amendment, they could probably
22 go to a vote in Congress at some point.
23 Whether they can get it
24 through 35 states, whether they can get it
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1 through this Congress, I don't think so but it’s possible.
2 But we know for our opponents that there is
3 political hay to be made while the sun is shining
4 on this issue, but I don't think we can back
5 away.
6 I think we just have to be
7 strategic and thoughtful about how we go about
8 it.
9 MR. WOLFSON: I just wanted to add one
10 piece to that answer, which I totally agree with.
11 First of all, as I am sure
12 people know, neither Freedom to Marry nor Lambda
13 Legal endorse candidates. We are non-partisan
14 organizations. We are civil rights
15 organizations.
16 But for those who do care, as
17 many of us do as individuals about the politics
18 of our country and the fate of our country, the
19 worst thing we could do is to abandon the field
20 and to think that somehow if we fail to engage in
21 a dialogue, that will end the dialogue and everybody
22 will play nice and somehow it will go on to
23 something else and somehow history will pass over
24 us. That is just absolutely not at all what will
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1 happen.
2 There is a discussion about
3 marriage in this country; and, as I said,
4 earlier, the discussion about marriage is not
5 just about marriage.
6 It's about love and commitment
7 and equality and gay people and where you stand
8 on gay people and whether you think gay people
9 should have any measure of protection, large or
10 small.
11 The attack on marriage is not
12 just an attack on our right to marry. The bill
13 that they are pushing through in Ohio right now
14 is aimed at preventing not just our access to
15 marriage, which they had already denied, but
16 the ability of localities and arguably private
17 employers to provide health benefits, civil
18 unions, domestic partnership, bereavement leave
19 or anything else.
20 The attack on marriage is part
21 of the right wing's agenda for its purposes.
22 The American people are having
23 an important discussion now about marriage and
24 lesbians and gay men and same sex couples and our
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1 kids and family, and they are having that
2 discussion in the vocabulary, in the inescapable
3 vocabulary of marriage. If we fail to engage in
4 that dialogue, we are not doing our job.
5 Our job is not to make it
6 easier for politicians to do what they want. Our
7 job is to make it easier for politicians to do
8 what we want, and what we want is full
9 equality.
10 (Applause.)
11 MR. WOLFSON: That is what is good for our
12 country.
13 And so when we do our job,
14 what we do is we engage in that dialogue with
15 self-respect and persuasiveness and respect for
16 our neighbors that they can be fair, and we talk
17 here in the language of full equality and family
18 and love and what the country means and all the
19 reasons why it won't hurt to end this
20 discrimination and all the people it will help.
21 We talk here in the hopes that
22 politicians learn more and more as indeed has
23 happened, will rise at least to here [hand held high]; but if we
24 drop our work down to here [hand held medium high], we make it much
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1 harder for the politicians even to come to here [medium],
2 let alone to the here [high] that is our birth right.
3 So it is our job to not run
4 away from this discussion but instead to approach
5 it with confidence that as in other chapters of
6 American history, discrimination that seemed part
7 of the natural order of things can indeed change.
8 The fact of the matter is it
9 can, and it is not just me saying that. It is
10 not just us telling ourselves that.
11 When the Hawaii Supreme Court
12 launched this national discussion a mere decade
13 ago, most Americans had never put the words gay
14 and marriage in the same sentence.
15 Now, well more than two-thirds
16 of Americans believe that we will win the freedom
17 to marry.
18 Young people overwhelmingly
19 support the freedom to marry and have a rightful
20 sense of entitlement to that equality that we
21 have given this generation; and many states show
22 majority support or near majority support and
23 certainly majority acceptance for this step
24 toward equality.
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1 Now is not the time to tone
2 down or turn off the rhetoric.
3 Now is the time to find more
4 messengers to deliver a compelling and diverse
5 and strong message of equality and engage with
6 our neighbors in this civil rights discussion,
7 because we know that we can win.
8 MR. WILSON: I might add there are many
9 voices on the right who are trying to make
10 themselves heard on this issue as well, strictly
11 on the same principles; and whether they are
12 politicians or family or friends, there are
13 plenty of people who believe this is
14 fundamentally wrong to continue this
15 discrimination.
16 I will take a few more
17 questions and then we have to wrap it up.
18 Yes, sir, in the back.
19 MR. MAHONEY: Michael Mahoney.
20 I was wondering has anybody
21 tried to use a Canadian marriage license in their
22 home state to start a process yet, or is it too
23 soon?
24 MS. LOGUE: I am not aware of any lawsuits
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1 out there seeking respect or recognition for
2 those marriages.
3 Certainly people have come
4 back to their employers and to their communities
5 and sought and in many cases obtained benefits and
6 rights that are reserved to married people and
7 have had success, and that is really what we
8 encourage people to do is don't just focus on the
9 court, but focus on building support among the
10 people you interact with everyday to be seen as
11 and treated as the married person that you are.
12 MR. WILSON: We will take two more.
13 MR. AUSTIN: My name is David Austin. I
14 am an associate here at Jenner & Block.
15 I am also the co-chair of the
16 CBA's civil rights committee, and I just wanted
17 to make a point adding on to the three things
18 that Evan said we all can do as individuals.
19 I think a fourth thing is
20 consider what we can do as groups and
21 organizations.
22 For example, the work that
23 Jenner did in the Lawrence decision wouldn't have
24 been possible if it hadn't been for the
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1 individuals who were willing to take it on
2 themselves to actually do the work pro bono; and
3 as an individual who also has a role of
4 responsibility within the CBA Civil Rights
5 Committee, I certainly can reflect on that and
6 see what I can do, for example, with the Gay and
7 Lesbian CBA committee to affect a way the CBA as
8 a whole either reviews or proposes state
9 legislation. The bar organization can certainly
10 have a role and can do something.
11 I know that the American
12 Constitution Society, which is one of the big
13 sponsors of the event this evening certainly has
14 a growing number of people who have professional
15 connections and dedication, and I think it would
16 be one nice outcome of this evening among us we
17 can bring our own individual commitment but bring
18 along with it the commitment or the interest of
19 the organization that we already belong to.
20 MR. WILSON: Thank you.
21 Yes, sir
22 MR. MC CAFFREY-BOSS: Christopher
23 McCaffrey-Boss, with a hyphen.
24 My question is about
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1 corporations and institutions that allege to
2 include marital status and sexual orientation in
3 their non-discriminating policies.
4 I worked in Chicago for an
5 organization that does, and we have partnered
6 with the University of Illinois who also includes
7 marital status and sexual orientation.
8 I was appointed as a faculty
9 member there with the university, and it was
10 withdrawn on Friday, because they realized on my
11 paperwork that I refused to answer that I was
12 either married or single.
13 I pointed out to them it was
14 in violation of their own policy, and at the end
15 I would have to sign that it was all true, and I
16 can't say that I am married.
17 I am sure not going to say I
18 am single. So, I would just like to tell you
19 that I am not going to back down on this, and I
20 would like your observations on that.
21 MS. LOGUE: Are you in fact legally
22 married somewhere?
23 MR. MC CAFFREY-BOSS: No.
24 MS. LOGUE: Or do you just consider
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1 yourself not single and at least partnered and in
2 your hearts married?
3 MR. MC CAFFREY-BOSS: Right. I also think
4 I should apply the institution's policy.
5 MS. LOGUE: I am happy to talk about that,
6 but certainly with the issuance of a policy against marital status
7 discrimination it suggests that it's not relevant
8 what your marital status is.
9 I don't know if there are
10 other requirements that come into play at the
11 University or otherwise.
14 I think the issue of
15 marital status discrimination in the context of
16 people who are married in Massachusetts and
17 Canada will be interesting, but that is a little
18 bit different topic.
19 MR. WILSON: I am going to invite
20 everybody to continue the discussion over
21 cocktails.
22 MR. WOLFSON: I don't want to end without
23 inviting people not to just hear this
24 as something (hopefully) interesting, but to
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1 actually take action.
2 This is a critical moment, as
3 your question directly pointed out in our
4 country's history, in our movement's history and
5 for families.
6 Everyone can make a
7 difference. On www.freedomtomarry.org there are tons
8 of action steps and links to all of the
9 organizations that are working on this cause -- from
10 wonderful organizations like Lambda Legal (www.lambdalegal.org) to
11 state groups, to non-gay allied groups, to
12 religious groups to others, and that is a growing
13 list; and we need your help to grow that list.
14 You can join up with whatever
15 group you are most comfortable working with.
16 You can access the resources
17 and the action steps to get involved, but the
18 single most important thing that each one of us
19 can do is to ask other people to think about this
20 and speak out.
21 There is no substitute for
22 that in a democracy; and if everyone here will
23 make a personal commitment to do that and ideally
24 then on top of that, write a check to the people
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1 in Massachusetts, support wonderful organizations
2 like Lambda Legal, support political action here,
3 support the allies who speak out for us., we
4 will bring this to an end. We will bring this
5 discrimination to an end.
6 When we lost the Hardwick
7 case in 1986, there were people who felt we had
8 reached too high, people who felt we had suffered a
9 devastating blow, that our movement would not
10 recover.
11 It was at the height of the
12 AIDS epidemic. It was a terrible time for us,
13 but what did we do as gay people. We rallied.
14 We joined organizations like Lambda. We built
15 them. We fought back.
16 As non-gay people, we spoke
17 out in support of the civil rights movement. We
18 did not allow that one defeat to be the last
19 word, and 17 years later we won this incredible
20 victory, this strong victory, a victory
21 not just for gay people, but for all Americans with
22 more to come. That is what we get to do here.
23 There are periods in civil
24 rights history of creeping and periods of
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1 leaping.
2 There are times when you work
3 really, really hard and you do all the right
4 things, but it doesn't change.
5 It took 60 years between
6 Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board
7 of Education. But there are times of leaping.
8 We are in a time of leaping.
9 We are the ones who are writing the history that
10 is changing the understanding of young people
11 today and telling them that it's okay to be gay.
12 It's okay to dream that you can have a life
13 in which you commit to another person and build a
14 life together respected by your society. And we
15 are telling non-gay young people that it's wrong
16 to look down on others because they are
17 different.
18 We are the ones writing that
19 history, and everyone really needs to get up out
20 of this room and work with the organizations and
21 talk to your neighbors and write the checks and
22 make history and then we will be happy with the
23 history we have made. Thank you.
24 (Applause.)
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1 MR. WILSON: Thank you.
2 We are running out of time;
3 but before we go, I would like to personally and
4 on behalf of the sponsoring organization, thank
5 Gail Morse from Jenner & Block for being a
6 critical part of the evening and for putting it
7 together.
8 I would also like to thank
9 both Evan and Pat for agreeing to do this and to
10 take the time as they did in the drive over here.
11 It's not terribly bad weather, but it's still
12 considered one of the windiest corners in the
13 City.
14 I would like to thank all of
15 you for coming and invite you all to join us in
16 the other room where there is some food and
17 reviving and further questions if you have them.
18 Thank you.
19 (Applause.)
20 * * * * *
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1 STATE OF ILLINOIS ) ) SS. 2 COUNTY OF DU PAGE ) I, PATRICIA A. ARMSTRONG, a 3 Notary Public within and for the County of DuPage, State of Illinois, and a Certified 4 Shorthand Reporter, CSR No. 084-001766, of said state, do hereby certify: 5 That the foregoing meeting transcript was reported stenographically by me, 6 was thereafter reduced to typewriting under my personal direction and constitutes a true record 7 of the proceedings had; That the said meeting was 8 taken before me at the time and place specified; That the reading and signing 9 by the witness of the meeting transcript was agreed upon as stated herein; 10 That I am not a relative or employee or attorney or Council, nor a relative 11 or employee of such attorney of Council for any of the parties hereto, nor interested directly or 12 indirectly in the outcome of this action. IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I do 13 hereunto set my hand and affix my seal of office at Chicago, Illinois this 14th day of February, 14 2004.
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17 ______Notary Public, DuPage County, 18 Illinois. 19 My commission expires 03/23/05 20
21 C.S.R. Certificate No. 084-001766 22
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