Then Comes Marriage by Roberta Kaplan

married, not to undermine the institution of civil marriage. They do not want marriage abolished. They do not attack the binary nature of marriage, the consanguinity provisions, or any of the other gate-keeping provisions of the marriage licensing law. Recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of the same sex will not diminish the validity or dignity of opposite-sex marriage, any more than recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of a different race devalues the marriage of a person who marries someone of her own race.
    Chief Justice Marshall did not mince words about the reasons behind denying gay people the right to marriage, referring at one point to the “destructive stereotype that same-sex relationships are inherently unstable and inferior to opposite-sex relationships and are not worthy of respect.” She wrote later in the opinion, “The marriage ban works a deep and scarring hardship on a very real segment of the community for no rational reason,” explaining that it “suggests that the marriage restriction is rooted in persistent prejudices against persons who are (or who are believed to be) homosexual.” And, just as Justice Scalia had predicted, she also quoted from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lawrence .
    The Goodridge decision panicked a lot of political conservatives, including President George W. Bush. In his State of the Union address, delivered two months after the decision, he criticized “activist judges,” who were “redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives.” President Bush then went a step further, implying that he might want there to be a constitutional amendment to stop gay people from marrying: “If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.”
    Conservatives in the chamber jumped to their feet, applauding wildly. One person who was not clapping, however, was Gavin Newsom. The recently elected thirty-six-year-old mayor of San Francisco, Newsom was at the State of the Union address as the guest of California Representative Nancy Pelosi, and as he listened to the president, he was getting annoyed. If gay people wanted to get married, why not let them get married? In fact, he thought, why not let them get married now ? So, a few weeks after President Bush’s address, Mayor Newsom ordered the San Francisco County Clerk to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, who then proceeded to descend in droves upon San Francisco’s enormous Beaux-Arts City Hall building, the same place where the brave and groundbreaking gay rights hero Harvey Milk had been shot to death a quarter century earlier. Four thousand couples received marriage licenses before the California Supreme Court put the judicial kibosh on Mayor Newsom’s experiment a month later.
    When I heard what Gavin Newsom was doing, I thought it was incredible. In fact, I thought, That’s so California! No one here in New York would ever do something like that . Perhaps that is true of New York City officials. But two weeks after Mayor Newsom’s announcement, the twenty-six-year-old mayor of the Village of New Paltz announced that he, too, would allow gay couples to marry. Mayor Jason West performed twenty-five ceremonies before being arrested and charged with multiple misdemeanors of “solemnizing marriages without a license.” Mayor West’s efforts were also shut down by a court order, but after years of slowly ramping up, the fight for gay marriage was now truly on.
    A few weeks after officials shut down the New Paltz weddings, I received a call from an American Civil Liberties Union attorney named Matt Coles. Matt told me that the ACLU was planning to bring a lawsuit on behalf of couples who had signed up