Was Barney Frank right?

[mmcirvin]

To review the history here: In 2004, while the presidential election campaign was raging (the worst possible time, but what are you gonna do?) the Massachusetts court system ruled that the state constitution allowed same-sex marriage, and there was a proposed amendment to ban it. Amending the constitution requires approval in two consecutive votes by the legislature (with a time interval in between) followed by a public vote. The amendment passed the initial convention after much acrimonious and highly public debate.

Rep. Barney Frank argued counter-intuitively that the fight against the amendment wasn't worth it. It would just give religious conservatives a big club to beat liberals with during the national campaign, and, besides, he thought that once same-sex couples had been marrying for a year or so without calamity, the amendment would die either on the second vote in 2005 or on the subsequent popular ballot.

So Bush got narrowly reelected after a campaign that hit the moral-values angle hard (and lots of Democrats blamed gay-marriage advocates in the aftermath). Meanwhile, gay people in Massachusetts kept getting married, the second vote just happened and the amendment in fact went down by a tremendous margin, just like Frank predicted. So was Barney Frank right? Jay Ackroyd says he was.

I'm not so sure. First of all, I doubt that caving on the first vote would have accomplished anything. Massachusetts liberals couldn't control the timing of the court decision, or, for that matter, the behavior of city officials in California, so the issue was going to explode nationally and be exploited by Republicans regardless. (John Kerry was actually against gay marriage, but it didn't help separate him from the issue at all.) And it's not at all obvious to me that opponents' minds would have been as easy to change had the first campaign not urged them to watch events closely. It's true that you have to pick your battles, but worse-is-better switcheroo reasoning tends to be a sign that you've spent way too much time thinking about political strategy.

Second, I have the same concerns as commenter "Glenn in NYC": the vote isn't as good as it looks. The 2004 amendment was conceived as a compromise that would allow Vermont-style civil unions. At least some of the margin against it is really support for a more radical proposed version that will ban civil unions as well.

(Third point, added later: If you recall how this was actually going down at the time, Mitt Romney wanted to halt gay marriage by executive fiat until the amendment had an up-or-down public vote in 2006. Had advocates not pressed him on the illegality of this, there wouldn't even have been any facts on the ground.)

But it's absolutely true that gay marriage seems to be one of those things that many people are terrified of until the moment it becomes real. Those Vermont civil unions that seem so half-baked now were considered profoundly radical in 2000, and were the subject of vehement opposition with apocalyptic rhetoric. Once they'd been real for a while, the opposition inside Vermont mostly evaporated, or at least became quiescent. There is going to be at least one more major fight over this in Massachusetts, and Governor Romney's presidential aspirations are going to keep him fulminating against same-sex marriage. But time is on marriage advocates' side.

Comments

[jwgh]

I remember that at the time the ruling first came down it seemed that there were important divisions among the opponents to gay marriage. When, as was originally the case, gay marriage simply didn't exist then it was fairly simple to simply oppose changes to the institution; but once the institution had changed and gay marriage was allowed then it was no longer simple to decide what sorts of new changes were needed (whether it was simply to revert back to the old model, or to allow civil unions, and if so what would the nature of the civil unions be, and so on and so forth). It seems that as time has gone on these divisions have not gotten any more pronounced, and I hope that trend continues.

[(Anonymous)]

The thing about the whole anti-gay marriage amendment that people don't realize is that it was introduced by gay marriage SUPPORTERS, who KNEW it would never succeed, specifically to give John Kerry political cover. The Massachusetts Democratic establishment was FURIOUS at the Supreme Judicial Court for announcing the decision when they did, because they knew exactly what it would do to Kerry's national campaign. When Barney Frank argued "counterintuitively" that it wasn't worth fighting the amendment, what he was really saying was "please try and understand this amendment for the foredoomed piece of political leverage that it is". But of course he couldn't say that, because then the game would be up.

There is not now, and there has never been, anywhere CLOSE to enough support in the Massachusetts legislature for an amendment like this to pass. The only thing it could ever do was provide ammunition to defend against those who paint Massacusetts as some kind of ultra-liberal fringe state (which it basically is, if you ignore the "fringe" part). The fact that gay marriage would likely become much more acceptable during the year between the first and second votes was a bonus, but in no way a necessary condition of the amendment's failure.