The Marriage Law Project at The Catholic University of America

TOP6NEWS - October 14, 2004

1-NEWS: NEWS: SSM in presidential debate

2-NEWS: L. Cheney upset Kerry brought up her daughter

3-NEWS: NY pension system will recognize Canadian ssm

4-NEWS: Mayday for marriage tomorrow

5-FEATURE: Interview w/ 'Why marriage?' author

6-FEATURE: Profiles of ss couples w/ SF ssm license

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1-NEWS: NEWS: SSM in presidential debate

Bush, Kerry Differ on 'Choice' of Homosexuality

October 13, 2004

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/10/14/bush_kerry_differ_on_choice_of_homosexuality/

TEMPE, Ariz. (Reuters) - President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry, who both oppose gay marriage, disagreed Wednesday on whether the issue should be left up to states and offered differing answers on whether a person could choose to be homosexual.

In their third presidential debate, devoted to domestic issues, Massachusetts Sen. Kerry cited Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter Mary in arguing that sexual orientation was not a matter of individual choice and he said states have shown they are capable of managing their own marriage laws.

Bush, who supports a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, said he was unsure whether a person could choose to be homosexual and that an amendment was needed to ensure that the issue of marriage does not end up "being defined by courts."

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Asked by the debate moderator whether he thought homosexuality was a matter of choice, Bush said, "I just don't know. I do know that we have a choice to make in America and that is to treat people with tolerance and respect and dignity. It's important that we do that."

Kerry said, "I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it's not choice."

Kerry said he agreed with Bush that "marriage is between a man and a woman."

However, he called for anti-discrimination laws to protect the rights of homosexuals. In addition, referring to state authority over marriage laws, he said, "the states have always been able to manage those laws. And they're proving today, every state, that they can manage them adequately."

Bush defended his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, which both houses of Congress have rejected this year.

He said he was concerned that existing federal legislation against gay marriage could be overturned in courts. "I was worried that activist judges are actually defining the definition of marriage, and the surest way to protect marriage between a man and woman is to amend the constitution," he said.

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2-NEWS: L. Cheney upset Kerry brought up her daughter

Mention of Gay Daughter a Cheap Trick, Lynne Cheney Says

By Michael Laris

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, October 14, 2004; Page A06

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31310-2004Oct13.html

MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa., Oct. 13 -- Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Vice President Cheney, accused John F. Kerry on Wednesday night of "a cheap and tawdry political trick" and said he "is not a good man" after he brought up their daughter's homosexuality at the final presidential debate.

Mary Cheney, one of the vice president's two daughters and an official of the Bush-Cheney campaign, has been open about her lesbian status. The candidates were asked if they believe homosexuality is a choice, and President Bush did not mention Mary Cheney. Then Kerry said, "If you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as."

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3-NEWS: NY pension system will recognize Canadian ssm

Pension System Recognizes Gay Spouses

By MICHAEL COOPER

NY Times

Published: October 14, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/nyregion/14marriage.html?oref=login

ALBANY, Oct. 13 - New York State is moving to officially recognize same-sex marriages from Canada for the first time, at least in one limited area: State Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi has ruled that the state's pension system will treat gay couples with Canadian wedding licenses the same way it treats other married couples.

The decision came after Mark E. Daigneault, a state employee seeking to wed his male partner in Canada, wrote the comptroller's office asking what the financial implications of the marriage would be. After studying the issue, Mr. Hevesi wrote back last week that the state's $115 billion pension funds, which he oversees, would "recognize a same-sex Canadian marriage in the same manner as an opposite-sex New York marriage.''

While the practical impact of the decision is limited, gay rights groups hailed the move as a giant step toward winning wider recognition for gay marriages.

"This becomes the first statewide program to recognize those same-sex Canadian marriage licenses as being real, and equal to any other marriages in New York State,'' said Alan Van Capelle, the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, noting that Mr. Hevesi's move comes after several municipalities in the state and major car insurance companies decided to recognize same-sex marriages from Canada.

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4-NEWS: Mayday for marriage tomorrow

Pastor takes anti-gay-marriage message to nation's capital

By JOHN IWASAKI

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/195144_marriage14.html?searchpagefrom=1&searchdiff=0

More than 100,000 Christians are expected to flood the National Mall tomorrow to uphold marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and to remind politicians of their power at the polls.

The massive gathering in Washington, D.C., was conceived by the Rev. Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, who organized the Mayday for Marriage rally at Safeco Field on May 1.

With support from a number of national Christian ministries, including Focus on the Family, Hutcherson led the planning of tomorrow's event, also called Mayday for Marriage.

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5-FEATURE: Interview w/ 'Why marriage?' author

Why Marriage?’ Author George Chauncey

by Owen Keehnen

Windy City Media Group

2004-10-13

http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=6380

George Chauncey is Professor of American History at the University of Chicago and the author of the Lambda Award-winning historical opus Gay New York. Currently he is working intently on the voluminous follow up to that groundbreaking work, The Strange Case of the Closet. When his editor at Basic Books approached him to take a break from working on that sequel and write a book about the gay marriage issue he thought about it briefly before deciding “it was an important time to write something that might serve as a kind of intervention in the debate and help put it in perspective.” We should all be thankful he made that decision. The result is the recently released and absolutely amazing work, Why Marriage?, a historically based exploration of the issues surrounding same-sex marriage featuring a myriad of interesting points and surprising revelations about the debate. It makes for fascinating reading … and the man himself was just as interesting when we discussed his book and the same-sex marriage issue.

OK: What distinguishes your book, Why Marriage?, from the other gay marriage books on the shelf?

GC: Well, it really tries to put the debate over gay marriage in the context of the much larger debate over gay equality in American society. So it begins with recounting the history of discrimination that people faced just a few decades ago, which is a history that’s almost entirely forgotten now. I’ve been surprised that some state legislators and reporters I’ve talked to don’t know that gay people were kept from being served in bars or restaurants or fired in massive numbers from the federal government, or that the discussion of gay issues in Hollywood was forbidden just a few decades ago. So for starters I thought it was important to remind people of that history and then to try and talk about how we got from that point to the point where the issue of gay marriage is suddenly front and center on the national agenda, which would have really been almost unimaginable 20 years ago. So the book is certainly about the marriage issue but I hope it will also be useful for people who are involved in work for gay rights in trying to understand the dramatic emergence of gay visibility and issues in the past decade.

OK: I found it fascinating to learn in your book how much of this anti-gay and lesbian legislation was put into place relatively recently, mostly in the 1920s-1950s.

GC: It’s really dangerous and it hurts us that we are so unfamiliar with this history because the opponents of gay rights and certainly same-sex marriage like to claim that history is on their side and that discrimination and hostility against gay people is age old. It’s important to note there’s been a long history in the regulation of sexual acts of various kinds, not just homosexual acts but many acts that happily married heterosexual couples engage in as well. The history of the systematic discrimination of gay people on the basis of their status as homosexuals is really a product of the 20th century. Most of it was put in place between the 1920s and 1950s and most was dismantled between the 1960s and the 1990s so that the right wing is simply wrong when it calls on its theories of millennium world teaching against gay people.

OK: Another fascinating part of your book discusses the lessons that our movement has and can learn from the Black civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

GC: The book tries to show all the many ways the gay movement from its beginnings in the 1950s, drew inspiration from the model provided by the Black civil-rights movement and how many of its earliest victories in the courts, in the legislative arena, in the court of public opinion, in the campaign to change media images to make them more accurate and supportive— that all of this is built upon the victories of the Black civil-rights movement and other minority movements. But I also thought it was important to talk about the very vexed question of the relationship between gay rights and civil rights since this has come up a lot in relation to the marriage issue. And I want to add that white gay people who try to say this is just the same and this is just a civil-rights movement or that discrimination faced by Black people is just the same as discrimination faced by gay people aren’t doing history or the gay cause any justice. It’s important to understand they are different historical experiences and at the same time understand that many of the arguments against gay rights today are very similar to the arguments against Black civil rights just a half century ago … certainly on the issue of marriage you see this.

OK: It’s extremely powerful when you draw comparisons between interracial marriage and even interfaith marriages.

GC: The opponents of same-sex marriage often like to say that marriage has always been a religious institution so maybe you can allow people to have domestic partnerships, maybe you can allow them to have civil unions, but protect marriage as a religious institution. But in fact, marriage since The Revolution in this country has never been a religious institution. It has always been a civil institution. Whether or not you have it religiously sanctioned that’s your choice, but if you want to be married that is a civil procedure. One of the clearest ways we see this is the churches have not been able to control interfaith marriages. Both the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches worked very hard to keep people of their faith from marrying people of another faith and they imposed all sorts of church sanctions, especially in the Catholic Church, but they couldn’t keep people from getting married because marriage was a civil institution. And this just gets erased when we don’t look at the history of marriage as an institution.

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6-FEATURE: Profiles of ss couples w/ SF ssm license

Six tales of marital bliss and cruel disappointment.

AS TOLD TO KARA PLATONI

kara.platoni@eastbayexpress.com

East Bay Express, CA

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2004-10-13/news/feature_1.html

Last winter, close to four thousand gay and lesbian couples exchanged wedding vows beneath the dome of San Francisco's City Hall. Six months later, the state Supreme Court declared the marriages "void and of no legal effect."

Try telling that to the people who were there.

Six very different East Bay couples agreed to tell us about their lives since that remarkable Valentine’s Day weekend, and their legal and emotional roller-coaster ride as the first people in American history to be married, and then involuntarily unmarried by the courts. They are ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Times in which bureaucracies and politicians debate how and whether to recognize their bonds — and in which a lack of recognition brings serious consequences.

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Johnny & William

Johnny Symons, 38, documentary filmmaker

William Rogers, 39, senior programs director

Kids: Zachary, 5 and Kenyon, 3.

Years Together: 11

Johnny: Suddenly one day the opportunity presents itself to get married and it was this now or never thing, and we just jumped at the chance. I started frantically calling City Hall -- are you guys really issuing same-sex marriage licenses today? What's the procedure? All the lines were jammed, there was no information available. So I said, what the hell. I know they close the doors at four o'clock, it's Friday, it's a three-day weekend -- chances are really good the court is going to slam the door on this when the doors open Tuesday morning. If we're ever going to do this, this is our little window of opportunity.

William: I was at work and Johnny called me up and he says, "Hey, will you marry me?" And I said, "You know what -- I'm on the other line, let me call you back." Then I called him back and I'm like, "Now, what is this?"

Johnny:[joking] By then I'd asked someone else.

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Johnny: We feel that we're pioneers in terms of gay dads. Alameda County has a really high concentration of gay dads -- I'm talking about out gay men who have made a conscious decision to form families together without women as primary caregivers in their children's lives. That's a pretty new phenomenon -- when you said "gay dads" twenty years ago, you were really talking about guys who had been straight and married and had gotten divorced and were still parenting.

William: Or it was gay men having children with lesbians and doing some of the coparenting. People are not used to men parenting, period. Much less two men being together and then being parents. At Zach's school, I went in one day to pick him up and like five kids come running up to me like, "Does Zachary have a mom?' And I smiled and I said, "You know, Zachary is very lucky, he has two dads.' So the kids were like, "I want two dads!" A couple of months later, they started to press a little bit more. They were like, "How was he born?" So then we talked about adoption. But a lot of the kids' parents were like, "I didn't know what to say to my child." They get sort of thrown off by the two-dad thing. We wound up writing this letter to the school basically saying, look, it's adoption. Every adopted kid's story is similar: They grew in a woman's tummy and then they came to live with another family. It seems like if marriage for gay men and lesbians were socially sanctioned, we would have gone through a lot of this already. It really does add an additional burden to our kids as well, because kids are asking questions and we have to help them figure out how to explain it. And then when you have to explain that we can't even be married, in a social way, it sort of knocks the legitimacy of our relationship down a notch.

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Isobel & Angela

Isobel White, 36, senior policy associate

Angela Dawn White, 33, human resources analyst, photographer

Years Together: 4

Isobel is nine months pregnant with the Berkeley couple's first child. The baby was conceived through a known sperm donor, a longtime friend who will act as a "super-uncle." Because Angela is not the child's biological parent, she will adopt, but it won't be final until four to six months after the birth. In the meantime, Angela has no parental rights. The couple tied the knot six days after learning Isobel was pregnant.

Isobel: We laugh sometimes about how many different attempts we've made to get married. We registered as domestic partners in June of 2001 and then in September 2002 we actually had what our friends called the most traditional "nontraditional" wedding in history.

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Wendy & Belinda

Wendy Daw, 37, acupuncturist

Belinda Ryan, 40, helicoptor pilot, aerial photographer

Years Together: 7

Belinda is a British citizen from Wales here on an employer-sponsored H1-B work visa. Because their marriage is not federally recognized, Wendy cannot sponsor Belinda for US citizenship. Although the Fremont couple has registered as domestic partners, they haven't had the time for a private ceremony, or the money -- they've spent more than $20,000 trying to extend Belinda's visa. Belinda's visa extensions expire in April 2006, and she'll have to leave the country. Wendy plans to leave, too.

Wendy: I think we all got maybe four hours of sleep because we planned to be at City Hall at 6:30 in the morning.

Belinda: We were actually fourth in line. We watched the sun rise over the city.

Wendy: It was so impromptu. We didn't even have rings. We haven't bought rings yet for each other because we spend all our money on immigration attorneys!

At some point in my early adult life, I knew I wasn't going to marry a man, so I always drew lines around how involved I would get with whomever I went out with. I had never lived with anybody before Belinda, and for me that was the line: If I choose to live with someone, that's tantamount to me saying I've married you. So from the moment I handed her the key and she moved in, I'd made that commitment. But we hadn't done that publicly. So when we stood there in front of our friends and we got married, what I was really struck by, moved by -- shaken by, actually -- was that wow, this is real. It actually kind of freaked me out a little bit. It was like, wow, I've married you. That felt very big. That felt very final. It was really a huge step in my life.

What's next for you?

Belinda: We've got a country we can go to. Because of my British passport I can take Wendy back there. If I was from Asia or the Middle East, Wendy as an American probably wouldn't be able to get into the country. Plus you couldn't live there as a gay couple without severe difficulties.

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Stewart & Leland

Stewart Blandón, 38, doctor

Leland Traiman, 52, nurse practitioner, fertility clinic owner

Kids: Julian, 4

Years Together: 14

Leland likes to say their son came "from the Internet." Although the Alameda couple used an adoption agency, they met Julian's birth mother through a Web site Stewart put up. They took two days to get married; one standing in line with an antsy four-year-old to get the license and another to do the ceremony.

Had you previously had a ceremony?

Leland: [laughs loudly]

Stewart: For us, it wasn't a giant priority. We dated our marriage from October 11, 1991. That's the day Berkeley extended domestic partner registration to everybody on the planet. We got certificate #3 and we had a little ceremony with the mayor ...

Leland: ... and 28 other couples.

Stewart: People always ask us, "Are you going to get married?" and we said, well, not really. We know we're married, and that was that. No friends, no family, nothing.

So why did you do it?

Stewart: I remember saying to Leland specifically that if they shut it down -- which I fully expected them to do -- we'll have an interesting souvenir. I just didn't have high hopes that this was going to go anywhere legally.

Leland: I had every confidence that we would lose it in the courts. But it was important to make a statement. Because battles like these are never won overnight. As much as Gavin Newsom, bless his name, wanted to give us our civil rights, civil rights are never given, they are always won.

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Jennifer & Amy

Jennifer Ikemoto, 34, state employee

Amy Bohorquez, 30, Laney College biology instructor

Years Together: 3

Both members of this Oakland couple are mixed-race -- Jennifer is of Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese descent, and Amy is Colombian and Irish -- and both come from Catholic families in which some members do not approve of homosexuality. A photograph of them getting married made the front page of many newspapers, outing the couple to some of Amy's family members.

Amy: We were going to go to Las Vegas and get married about a year and a half ago, then our friends got all mad at the idea that we were going to elope. It actually costs a lot of money, so I was like, I'm not spending $1,500 to get married by Elvis! So we decided to have a wedding ceremony -- we'd planned on June 2004. We were about halfway through planning our wedding when Gavin Newsom changed the application form. So it was like, hmmm...

Jennifer: It was like "Gay Marriage Watch" on the news. We were sitting there watching all of the couples who got married and the joy on everybody's faces.

Amy: We were like, oh, we've gotta go. So we finished our coffee and threw on clothes and ran down to BART.

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Mickey & Sallyanne

Mickey Neill, 53, retired human resources manager

Sallyanne Monti, 43, consulting firm director

Kids: Stephanie, 20; Christine, 19; Alyssa, 15; Frank, 14

Years Together: 6

The four children of this Alameda couple are Sallyanne's from a previous marriage. Their father, who has since remarried, shares custody of the kids; because their marriage is not recognized, Mickey is not a legal stepparent. The two eldest kids are attending college. The younger ones, Alyssa and Frank, took part in the interview.

Sallyanne: We got invited to a reception at City Hall by the mayor with a lot of other people. It was in the midst of Day 2 of marrying same-sex couples. I think at that point we were blown away by the fact that, wow, you can really get married.

Mickey: We thought we were married for all intents and purposes. We thought really that heterosexuals owned the word "marriage" and that's the way the world worked.

Sallyanne: We didn't agree with it, mind you.

Mickey: We had done a lot to protect ourselves and the kids financially with wills and living trusts and all the paperwork that a heterosexual doesn't need to do to protect their children. We thought we had done everything that we could to solidify our family in all the rights that were available to us at the time. So we went to the reception and it was like marriages were breaking out! This was kind of exciting! We looked at each other and said, "Do you want to get married?'"

Sallyanne: We thought it would be our way of participating in history. We thought we were doing it for the community and that we didn't need it, but in the final analysis it was a wake-up call to the fact that we'd been denied our civil rights.

So you went back another day?

Sallyanne: I think we got up at 4. We got to the city at 5:30 a.m.

Mickey: Getting teenagers out of bed at that time is not what they like to do, but they were totally up for it. We brought coffee and things to eat, and we opened up our tent and put it on the sidewalk. Everybody was crazy in love, in front of us, in back of us, they were excited and so happy to be there. Everybody would come by honking, or donating food, bringing coffee ...

Sallyanne: ... socks, gloves ...

Mickey: ... because it was pouring rain. Just taking care of us.

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