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National Religious Leadership Roundtable: Constitutional Convention in Massachusetts

from The Rev'd Jay E. Johnson, Ph.D.
CLGS Programming and Development Director

Jay Johnson, CLGS Programming and Development Director, has joined other religious leaders from around the country to bear witness to the religious support of the freedom to marry. Jay is writing his reflections from an historic Constitutional Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, that is convening to decide whether the Commonwealth's constitution should be amended to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman.

Part One: Tuesday, March 9, 2004—The Boston Tea Party of Marriage
Part Two: Wednesday, March 10, 2004—Have Collar, will Lobby

Tuesday night, March 9, 2004—The Boston Tea Party of Marriage

All marriage all the time. Marriage and religion, 24/7. The all marriage cable television channel (brought to you by Hers and Hers Tuxes and Rent-a-Priest, Inc.).

Marriage is the only thing everyone is talking about these days. At least, that's how it seems when you're in the thick of LGBT religious activism and scholarship. Quite frankly, I've been finding the intensity and relentlessness of this topic a bit tedious in recent weeks. Until, that is, I arrived here in Boston, for the twice yearly meeting of the National Religious Leadership Roundtable, convened by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

I've discovered over the last couple of days that the emotional impact of marriage has a way of sneaking up on a person when one least expects it. That happened to me not so long ago, on the eve of launching the CLGS Marriage Project on this website back on Friday, February 13, which was the day after the city of San Francisco started issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

As I was making some last minute adjustments and additions to the content of the Marriage Project that afternoon, the phone rang in my office. It was Mary Tolbert, the Executive Director of CLGS.

"I'm standing in line at city hall in San Francisco," she said, a bit out of breath. "Lynn [Mary's partner] and I are getting a license. Will you perform the wedding?"

My mind went in to immediate overdrive. I'm an Episcopal priest, so the "state" says I could do it, but did the church say I could do it? I quickly realized it didn't matter. These were colleagues and friends calling on an historic occasion asking me to participate in a moment of historic social justice. Besides, Mary and Lynn have been together for fourteen years. In everyone's eyes (except most churches and most states) they were already married.

"Yes," I said, a bit breathless myself. "Of course I will."

So off I dashed to the city with my mother in tow. (I had already made plans to take my mother out to dinner and to the ballet that night, for Valentine's Day weekend. "Do you want to stop on the way and witness a wedding?" I asked her on the phone. "Sure," she said. "Sounds like fun." So off we went.)

City Hall was a zoo, but it was not a circus. Every nook and cranny of that building was occupied with a couple exchanging the vows of marriage. There was nothing carnival-esque about that cavernous monument to municipal government that day, but it was buzzing with energy—the energy of joy, of love, of dumb-founded shock, of the kind of giddy and disorienting jubilation I could only imagine was something like what the people of Israel felt leaving Egypt, or how women felt when they could finally vote.

As an Episcopal priest for more than fifteen years now, I have performed many weddings. Until that day, all of those weddings had been between a man and a woman—some were joyful, others were, frankly, perfunctory. And I've signed many a marriage license in my day, yet I've never cried while doing so.

I also have to note here that while Mary and Lynn are many things—extraordinarily competent, highly skilled, deeply intelligent, articulate, over-educated, no-nonsense, get-the-job-done-and-well kind of women—they are not prone to public displays of emotion or sentimentality. Yet there we all were, all three of us, on the verge of blubbering like idiots, tears welling up and spilling over as Mary and Lynn exchanged vows of commitment, to which I responded, "I hereby declare that you are lawfully wedded spouses for life."

Like I said, the emotional impact of marriage has a way of sneaking up on a person.

So here I am in Boston, where a revolution began with the historical equivalent of "activist judges" dumping tea into the harbor and where, just two days from now, the Constitutional Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will decide whether "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" really does apply to one and all. Marriage equality is our Boston tea party and it is no less revolutionary. This is surely part of its emotional impact: In many ways, this is our twenty-first century Stonewall Rebellion, and we're living in it.

The Religious Leadership Roundtable has, as part of its mission, the goal of ensuring that explicitly religious voices for LGBT social justice are heard just as resoundingly as the voices of religious intolerance and oppression in the public discourse of our country. This is part of the mission of CLGS too, which is why CLGS is a member of the Roundtable and why I'm in wintry cold Boston right now (with snow on the ground and in the air) rather than in sunny, warm California.

After a good but long day of political strategizing, theological reflection, logistical planning, textual analysis and budget assessments, I knew it was important for me to be here, but I was tired and not a little bit grumpy. Then tonight, that emotional impact blind-sided me yet again.

Tonight was our public event, for which invitations had been sent far and wide in the greater Boston metro area, to the media and to religious leaders of every stripe. We met at Emmanuel Boston Church for this event (an Episcopal church, I'm both proud and glad to say), which was meant to underscore the religious support for the freedom to marry. That's when the impact hit, as the church slowly and steadily filled up and a long line of clergy processed into the church, many of them vested, and we all raised our voices in song ("We are marching in the light of God") and in witness to the long history in this country of religious leadership in movements of social change. And we heard people speak some powerful truth tonight. I'll mention just two.

We heard from Jimmy Creech, the United Methodist minister, a heterosexual man married to a woman, who was defrocked in 2000 for performing a religious union ceremony for two men. Even though I had known that about him before tonight, it suddenly struck me, right in the heart: For our sake, for the sake of justice, this man willingly gave up his professional vocation. Rabbi Devon Lerner, the co-chair of the Massachusetts Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry (which now boasts more than 500 clergy), introduced him and said, "Jimmy may have lost his title of Reverend, but he's still a religious leader for us."

"Tell your stories," Creech urged us. "You are the revolution, and there's no more powerful tool in this struggle than your love and your families. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But in the end, such love cannot be resisted."

We heard from Byron Rushing, an African American Massachusetts legislator and ardent advocate of the freedom to marry. He gave us a history lesson in the Constitution, which might as well have been a lesson in Biblical exegesis.

"It doesn't matter, not at all, what the authors of our founding documents had in mind when they wrote them," he said. "It doesn't matter what Thomas Jefferson was thinking when he penned the Declaration of Independence. It doesn't matter what those white, male property owners were thinking when they drafted the preamble to the Constitution. It doesn't matter that they said, 'We the people.' It matters how we hear it.

"It matters," Rushing went on, "that eventually and finally poor people who didn't own any property heard themselves in the 'we'. It matters that women eventually and finally heard themselves in the 'we'. It matters that people of color eventually and finally heard themselves in the 'we'. It matters today that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people hear themselves in the 'we'. And it matters that you, as religious leaders, in a country of religious freedom, are making sure the legislators of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hear your 'we'."

(So why isn't this man running for president??)

I lost count tonight of how many times that gathered throng rose to its feet in thunderous applause. I lost count of how many times I caught sight, in a new way, of what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. I lost count of how many times I put aside my lingering ambivalence about the institution of marriage and how it deserves a thoroughly queer critique and how bad it's been historically for women and that not everyone actually wants to get married. I put that aside tonight and was able to see a bit more clearly that marriage is about social justice, pure and simple.

Tomorrow, we're taking our religious voices to the legislators in the Statehouse. We'll be trained in legislative lobbying in the morning and we'll lobby the legislators in the afternoon. I'm not without some anxiety about this. Having never done this before, I'm worried about saying something stupid. But at least, in good biblical fashion, we'll be making these lobbying visits in pairs. And we'll tell the legislators just as clearly as we know how: "The freedom to marry is about justice, and we're here, as religious leaders, because our faith compels us to work for justice. Please, do not write discrimination into the oldest constitution in the United States of America."

Predictions vary widely about what will happen on Thursday. Yet this much seems clear to me now: It's not a matter of if but when marriage equality will be a reality in this country. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but love and justice will have the final word.

If you don't live in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, rest assured—this wave is heading in your direction. Religious communities in each and every state need to be prepared now to engage in this struggle for civil rights (because that's what legally recognized marriages are all about) and to insist, as American religious leaders and communities always have, on social justice.

At the very least, be ready for an emotional impact. Remember, such impacts have a way of sneaking up on a person.

Wednesday evening, March 10, 2004—Have Collar, will Lobby

This city is buzzed. The media are starting to crawl all over it. The Constitutional Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts reconvenes tomorrow and the purveyors of hateful religious speech have already arrived. They're standing in front of the Statehouse with their enormous signs and banners: "Got AIDS Yet?" and "God Hates Fags" and "Sodomites will burn in hell." (Actually, they are about to see a whole bunch of those sodomites descending on them tonight as a candlelight vigil will take place on the Statehouse steps starting at 6:30 this evening.)

The National Religious Leadership Roundtable was trained this morning on how to lobby legislators and we were drilled on the main talking points on the freedom to marry issue and especially how to frame the question of amending the Massachusetts Constitution. While some of these key talking points are particular to Massachusetts, they have implications for other states and some federal issues. Besides, knowing the issues here will help us digest the news reports. Consider the following.

First, LGBT people already have the right to marry in Massachusetts. That's what the Supreme Judicial Court decided last November. Putting this right to marry into practice begins May 17, by court order. So amending the state Constitution at this point would actually take away rights from a whole class of citizens.

Second, don't be fooled by so-called "compromise amendments" that grant "civil unions" but stop short of marriage. This simply creates second-class citizens with rights that are separate and not equal. The main point here is that "civil unions" are not portable. Just drive across the state line and suddenly you're no longer married.

The Attorney General of New York put this issue rather pointedly. He said that New York law does not allow for granting same-sex marriage licences. However, if such a couple is legally married in another state, New York has an obligation to honor that marriage. Digest that amazing observation for a moment. Put simply, we cannot accept anything short of marriage.

Third, as far as the state is concerned, marriage is and ought to be only about a civil contract. To make it anything other than that infringes on religious liberty. If, for example, Massachusetts accepts the Roman Catholic argument that marriage is defined as only between a man and woman and puts this argument into law, this denies the rights of other religious traditions to define marriage as they see fit. This is religious discrimination, which the state must not and is not allowed to do.

With these talking points in mind, we made our way to the Statehouse, many of us (myself included) in clergy collars. I have to say, this was a powerful experience for me. It was quite powerful indeed to be sitting in a legislator's office, wearing my clergy collar and saying, "As a religious leader, my faith compels me to urge you to vote for social justice and refuse to write discrimination into the oldest Constitution in the United States."

It is so terribly important—and I cannot stress this enough—for religious communities and religious leaders to speak out on this issue and to insist on understanding the freedom to marry as a civil rights and social justice issue. We heard from several legislators today that we were the very first religious voices they have heard urging them to reject amending the Constitution. They are literally inundated and flooded with phone calls, emails, postcards and personal visits from religious hardliners urging them to "protect the sanctity of marriage."

We have our work cut out for us and the mission of CLGS couldn't be more clear in this highly-charged atmosphere, both here in Massachusetts and around the country. We simply must get the word out about a different kind of religious voice. Religious communities need not be willing to celebrate same-sex marriages themselves, but every religious community ought to have a stake in securing civil marriage equality for all people.

The legislators seemed genuinely grateful for our visits today—out of a total of 200, we were able to have conversations with 23 of them or with their legislative staff.

There is much more to tell and to reflect on here. For now, I'm out the door and on my way to the candle-light vigil, still wearing my collar. This has been such an important lesson on what that one visual clue—the collar—can do and the difference it can make in situations like this.