For new father, issue begins to resonate

Before the first gay marriages, Tom Balish said, he was like a lot of people who opposed same-sex marriage: ''Asleep at the switch."

But seeing images of women marrying women and men marrying men -- first in San Francisco, then in Massachusetts -- transformed the issue for him. Suddenly, it was no longer an abstract concept.

''It's just a very visible sign of how far we've gone from traditional marriage," he said. ''These events forced a lot of people to say, 'What's happening? I've assumed this certain thing about our culture, and now I look around and it's not true.' "

It seems to him that gay marriage came quickly. He was aware of court cases being fought around the country, but none of them affected him.

''Let's say that a court case is won, or maybe even civil unions become legalized, like in Vermont," Balish said. ''That's a news event, but it doesn't have the same resonance as marriage. Marriage is something we all know and all grew up with. It's the base of the family structure. . . . We realize that that institution is being fundamentally changed."

And so the teacher and new father from Hopkinton started getting involved. He read and thought about both sides of the gay marriage issue and became ''much more convinced that it's really not a good thing." He did some research for the Coalition for Marriage, which fought for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He attended seminars and legislative hearings.

Balish, 40, knows gay marriage opponents are often characterized as ''bigots or meatheads or hateful," but he has never had any of those impulses, he said. ''It's not about hating or disliking any individual people. It's just saying marriage is too important an institution to do something like this, especially to kind of rush into it with a decision made by the courts and not by the people."

He has never been much of a joiner, he said. Until now. ''I wouldn't have predicted this," he said.