Romney chides Legislature on gay marriage
Governor Mitt Romney suggested yesterday that the Legislature's proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is merely a facade, because lawmakers refuse to allow him to go before the state's high court and seek a stay of the landmark Nov. 18 ruling that legalized same-sex matrimony.
Although lawmakers passed the amendment last month, it must be passed again in the next legislative session and win approval at the ballot box in the November 2006 general election before it can become law.
That means that gay marriage will be legal in this state for at least the next 2 1/2 years.
"I'm wondering whether the first step they took, which was to pass an amendment, was a facade or was it a real effort to limit marriage to a relationship between man and a woman," Romney said. "If it is a real effort with real intent, then the Legislature will give me the occasion to reach the Supreme Court and ask for a stay. Otherwise, we will have same-sex marriage in Massachusetts without a decision of the people."
Romney ratcheted up his rhetoric a day after the Senate, under the leadership of President Robert E. Travaglini, refused to consider an emergency bill the governor filed earlier this month seeking special power to go before the Supreme Judicial Court to seek a stay of its ruling before it goes into effect on May 17.
When Romney filed his bill, the House speaker, Thomas M. Finneran, pledged to hold a hearing on the bill and invited Romney to testify on the measure.
Romney singled out the Senate yesterday in his attack on the Legislature: "I again call on both branches of the Legislature, in particular, the Senate. I believe the House is moving on that front."
Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Travaglini, Ann Dufresne, said the Senate has no intention of looking back, despite Romney's attempt to portray the Senate as insincere in its effort to outlaw gay marriage.
"We moved on to the budget," Dufresne said. "We have had four days of intense debate at the constitutional convention, and we have turned our full focus onto other, more pressing matters."
Romney, a Republican and an ardent opponent of same-sex marriage, filed his bill after Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, a Democrat, refused to appoint a special attorney general to ask the SJC to stay its ruling.
Earlier this week, the Catholic Action League, which opposes gay marriage, attempted to step in where Romney couldn't, petitioning the court to stay its ruling.
Reilly filed an opposition brief yesterday that called the Action League's petition "an impermissible collateral attack by a nonparty without standing" in the gay marriage case that led to the court's historic ruling, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health.
"There is no jurisdictional or procedural basis for such an attack stated in the petition, nor is any basis apparent," the brief said.
Romney sought yesterday to distance himself from the Catholic Action League's maneuver, however, saying he believed that his own strategy was the only reasonable way to block gay marriages from taking place on May 17.
"Other citizens are certainly entitled to pursue those avenues which they feel they want, but I'm not involved in any way with those other efforts," Romney said.
While Romney was quick to file emergency legislation seeking authority to go before the SJC, he has declined to take a position on whether to rescind a controversial 1913 state law that blocks out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts if the union would be disallowed in their home state.
The law has set off debate recently, because Romney has indicated it would prohibit most out-of-state gay couples from being eligible to marry here. In addition, the law is controversial, because it is rooted in part in efforts to protect historical bans on interracial marriages.
A small group of Democratic House members has filed a bill to abolish the law.
In its 1912 report urging passage of the Uniform Marriage and Marriage License Act, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws said: "If several states could be induced to adopt the same prohibitions, whether as to marriage with a paramour, or marriage between a white and a negro . . . then of course by adopting this proposed act uniformity could be attained."
It goes on to state, "As to marriages against the public policy of any state, e.g., . . . between a white and a colored person," the act will "give full effect to the prohibitory laws of each state."
Asked if he were reconsidering his determination to uphold the law, given the revelations that the statute was passed in part to uphold a ban on interracial marriage, Romney reiterated his intention to "fulfill the law as it exists" when May 17 rolls around. "In our system, the law is not a choice which a governor makes as to which law to follow and which not," Romney said. "My job is to execute the laws." 