Thursday, 4:30 PM
SJC hears arguments on gay marriage ballot question
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe staff
In a wide-ranging debate that touched on topics from slavery to the Progressive Era of American politics, supporters of same-sex marriage today urged the state's highest court to disqualify a controversial ballot question asking voters to ban gay matrimony starting in 2008.
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders argued to the Supreme Judicial Court that Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly ignored a provision in the state constitution that blocks citizen-generated ballot questions that seek the ``reversal of a judicial decision.''
The SJC legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts in November 2003.
The provision, approved at the Constitutional Convention between 1917 and 1918 that authorized such ballot questions, clearly meant that ``the people shouldn't be able to directly attack an SJC decision,'' said Gary D. Buseck, the legal director at Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. ``They shouldn't be able to have a referendum on that decision.''
But Peter Sacks, deputy chief of the attorney general's government bureau and author of the 15-page decision last September that certified the ballot question, said that the provision dealt with attempts during the Progressive Era in the early 20th century to overturn court rulings by going directly to voters.
That is different, he insisted, from petitions such as the gay-marriage ban to change the constitution itself. The drafters of the provision were ``very clear that the people should be the masters of their own constitution,'' Sacks said.
