Gay marriage legal in Mass. for 20 years, but amid celebration activists told, fight on

BOSTON — It’s a simple gesture: the joining of hands between loved ones, a mother taking the hand of a toddler, a teacher taking the hand of a student, loving couples taking the hand of a partner.

Lucie Bauer took Annie Kiermaier’s hand as the couple sat in one of the front pews at the Arlington Street Church in Boston on Friday, attending the celebration marking the 20th anniversary of legal same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

It was serendipity that brought them from their home in Maine to Boston, a consultation with a specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute regarding a rare blood cancer. When they learned their appointment time would allow them to attend the anniversary celebration, they made a point of being there.

Same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004 based on a decision rendered in Supreme Judicial Court in an anti-discrimination lawsuit filed by seven same-sex couples against the state Department of Public Health. The suit, Goodrich v Department of Public Health, challenged the constitutionality of denying same-sex couples the same civil and legal rights as heterosexual couples.

In deciding in favor of the seven couples named in the suit, the state SJC ruled that “barring an individual from the protections, benefits and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution.”

The court issued a stay, pending legislative action that expired May 17, 2004. Just hours later, the Arlington Street Church held the first legal gay wedding in Massachusetts, celebrated by the Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie.

In reminiscing about the ceremony, Crawford Harvie said she had practiced and practiced the final line of the speech: “By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts… ." But she always burst into tears and could not articulate the final words, I hereby pronounce you legally married.

Making the first pronouncement

“As David (Wilson) and Rob (Compton) stood in front of me, surrounded by 86 news outlets, I realized I had yet to make it through that final line,” Crawford Harvie said. “But as I spoke, David’s father stood up, and the whole room erupted in celebration. All the joy and all the love gave me enough strength to say the words.”

That was the first wedding. In the days that followed, 55 other couples were married in the church.

“The Earth shifted on its axis,” Crawford Harvie said.

Central Massachusetts natives Ed Balmelli of Milford and Mike Horgan of Ayer were one of the couples that participated in the original lawsuit. Reflecting on the progress of the fight to obtain the right to marry, Horgan found the movement progressed at “lightning speed,” especially in comparison to other civil rights movements.

To many, they were role models. Interviewed, photographed, lives documented, theirs were two of the faces of the fight to extend the civil right to enter into a legal marriage to all loving couples. Now they are simply men, semiretired and planning for their futures.

“That we’re married makes it so much easier. He’s my husband, I’m his husband,” Horgan said, the whole point of legal marriage.

Also at the ceremony were Maureen Brodoff and Ellen Wade of Newton.

“We’ve just been living our lives for the last 20 years, just like other married couples, with our families, much like everyone else,” Brodoff said. The ceremony, however, reminded her of the excitement of 20 years earlier, the joint feelings of relief and triumph.

Community celebration heralded wedding

The women married in the Newton’s mayor’s office at Mayor David Cohen’s invitation. After the ceremony they were surprised with a community celebration. Their family and friends, residents, municipal workers and the whole community had been invited to honor the wedding and filled the lawn in front of the municipal building.

Listening to the stories of the couple who were married on that mid-May morning in 2004 and the days that followed in the church where they were now holding hands, Bauer and Kiermaier could empathize. Their struggle to marry took them on similar journeys.

When asked how long they had been married, Bauer said, “It depends. We’ve been together 30 years.”

There were different ceremonies marking their time together: a commitment ceremony in 1996, a civil union ceremony in Vermont in 1997 or ’98 and a California wedding in 2008. Their union became legal in Maine on Jan. 1, 2013.

“We were supposed to be married in Massachusetts. Annie was hiking the Appalachian Trail, but she didn’t make it far enough,” Bauer said.

Massachusetts was the first state to legalize marriage between same-sex couples through the court decision. Proponents of the Defense of Marriage constitutional amendment could have derailed that right. It was under former Gov. Deval Patrick’s watch that the campaign gained momentum and came close to being placed on the ballot for Massachusetts voters to decide.

The lawsuit against the Department of Public Health was filed as after the Defense of Marriage Act was launched and activists sought to place the issue on the ballot as a constitutional amendment. The proposed change to the state’s governing document would have defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

“It’s so good to be here with everyone,” Patrick said as he reminisced about the fight to secure and maintain the right for people to wed. He is proud that Massachusetts first recognized the right of residents to marry whomever they love. “It was a powerful example that reverberated around the United States.”

In speaking, Patrick confessed that he never understood why marriage equality generated so much pushback and why giving people a chance to live life as their whole selves was so threatening.

“The forces of darkness, of hostility and hate are out there; their objective to drain us of hope,” Patrick said. “But there are more of us out there of good conscience than of forces of darkness.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Mass. marks 20th year of same-sex marriage at ceremony in Boston