“Occasions like this help us to encourage one another,” said
Ronald A. Crews, speaking to the eleventh annual fundraising
banquet of Massachusetts Family Institute last Thursday night,
October 17. “It gets rough out there.” Crews is the president of
MFI.
It has, indeed, been a rough year for MFI (www.mafamily.org), a Christian
conservative organization that pitted much of its efforts at
passing the Massachusetts Protection of Marriage Amendment — only
to see that campaign quashed in a typical piece of Beacon Hill
political legerdemain.
Article 48 of the Massachusetts constitution says that the
combined House and Senate of the legislature, meeting as a
Constitutional convention once a year, shall vote on valid
petitions from citizens. If, in two successive conventions, a
petition gets more than 25 percent of the votes of the legislators,
it is moved automatically to the ballot in the following year —
2004, in the case of the Protection of Marriage Amendment.
The Amendment, really a rather mild definition that echoes acts
passed in 35 other states (and the federal Defense of Marriage Act,
passed in 1996), says, in its key passage, “…only the union
of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage
in Massachusetts. Any other relationship shall not be recognized as
a marriage or its legal equivalent, nor shall it receive the
benefits or incidents exclusive to marriage…” (For more
information, see http://marriagematters.org.)
Despite illegal efforts to block petition gatherers (amply
documented in photographs and testimony by MassNews, Massachusetts’ bulldog source for
family and religious news), the Amendment got far more than the
needed number of signatures. Public opinion surveys show support
for PMA running at about 60 percent. It’s a winner. An easy
winner.
As such, it aroused a fevered reaction among Massachusetts’
legendarily rabid liberal interest groups. They first challenged
the petition with the Attorney General. That failed. So the
Amendment went to the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts in the summer of 2002, sitting in combined session
and presided over by Senate President Thomas Birmingham — a
Democrat, naturally. Birmingham was in the pocket of the AFL-CIO,
one of PMA’s best-organized opponents.
Birmingham’s strategy? Don’t allow a vote, never mind what the
Constitution says. Instead, he had the body vote on adjournment,
then spun that vote (137-53) to the willing press as a loss for the
Amendment. As MFI’s newsletter put it, “Then Birmingham immediately
told an enormous lie: ‘Today we saw democracy in action. They may
not like it, but they lost 2-1.’”
And never mind that the legislators, after the adjournment vote,
fled from the howling gallery to their offices and hid.
In fact, the 53 votes against adjournment represent more than
enough votes to have moved the Amendment forward — petitions
require only a quarter of the combined House and Senate, with a
total membership of 200.
As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby pointed out,
Birmingham used the same technique used by former Senate President
William (Billy) Bulger to kill a term limits amendment in 1992.
That never came to a vote, either.
Jacoby was the keynote speaker at the MFI banquet. “What’s a
nice Jewish boy doing in a place like this?” he asked, drolly. He
recounted the history of Jewish immigrants to America, and pointed
out that the religious movement among, primarily, Orthodox Jews
like himself is the fastest growing segment of American Jewry.
“Movement doesn’t always have to be in the wrong direction,” he
said. “We are your allies.”
The Amendment isn’t MFI’s only issue. In addition to the
Marriage Matters project, which focuses on the Amendment and
associated legal actions, MFI partners with A Woman’s Concern in a
effort called “Dad’s the Man,” promoting responsible fatherhood;
funds the publication of a statistical survey of marriage in
Massachusetts; aims to start research on the effects of gambling in
the state; and will publish a brochure on teen abstinence.
Despite the past year’s roughing up, MFI is moving ahead.
President Crews said fundraising has stayed level, even in a down
economy. And promoters of the PMA have filed suit to try to expose
the illegality of Birmingham’s actions.
Get-togethers like the MFI banquet are every bit as encouraging
as Crews said. In fact, they are inspiring. I had never before —
at the advanced age of 54 — attended any kind of political
gathering. Not a banquet, not a fundraiser, not a rally, not a
caucus, not a convention. Surprise: It is very nice to discover
that you’re not alone. And very nice to take strength from that
discovery.
As Jacoby said, “Our beliefs are not just for believing. They’re
for doing…We’re not allowed to give up.”
