Did Ed Pawlick Do It?

After raising three girls and a boy as a single parent for fifteen years without domestic help, Pawlick married Sally McVay in 1985. They have eight grandchildren between them. All of Pawlick’s children have college degrees and two of the daughters have their doctorate.

Is He Behind ‘Citizens for Marriage?’

It’s expected that the Boston Globe will publish an exposé this month about the man behind the “Protection of Marriage” amendment, Atty. Ed Pawlick, Publisher of MassNews.

That’s because the financial reports of “Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage” will be reported to the Secretary of State in a few weeks. The Globe would like to “reveal” that a “right-wing publisher” is the largest contributor to the effort.

But the Globe’s problem is that MassNews reported in May 2000 on its front page that Pawlick was starting this organization. That paper was then mailed to 250,000 people (over half the circulation of the Globe) all around the state.

By Atty. J. Edward Pawlick
January 2002

The appetite of the Boston Globe for an exposé was whetted last July when a copy of a personal check that I gave to Massachusetts Citizens Alliance for $8,800 was printed in Bay Windows, a homosexual newspaper in Boston.

Needless to say, this caused many eyebrows to be raised because the editor of Bay Windows, Jeff Epperly, is known as an honorable and decent person. How was it possible for him to be dealing in theft and burglary of a personal check?

But it was painfully obvious that he didn’t obtain the copy of my personal check without a serious crime having been committed by someone.

I was startled to hear about this because Epperly has always been honest and square with me. His reporter, Scott Giordano, had always reported every conversation we ever had exactly as it had taken place. I was impressed because most of the secular press had not done that well.

Ed Pawlick (right), a 25-year-old rifleman in the Infantry with a shipping tag on his shoulder, prepares to board a ship for Korea in 1953 to fight the Chinese Army. Meanwhile, life for most in the U.S. went on as usual with only the poor being drafted. It was not as evident back then that it was a poor man’s war because the Army was still mostly white, and poor boys were not as evident as when they had black faces.

We disagreed on many issues but I did not doubt his integrity. My wife and I had visited Epperly and Giordano in February 1999, right after I wrote my first article exposing what Massachusetts was teaching about sex in the public schools. This was four months before the start of the print edition.

After I made the announcement about the new organization in May 2000, Giordano telephoned several times to get more on the story. But I told him that the people in charge of the new group were not yet ready to talk to the press. Giordano left for another job shortly thereafter and no one from Bay Windows ever followed up on the story.

Internal Documents

When Bay Windows ran its “exposé” last summer, it had the following headline over the story, “Internal documents reveal religious Right’s anti-gay game plan. Anti-marriage ballot battle considered for 2002; Is Mass News publisher Ed Pawlick underwriting effort?”

It said it had obtained “internal documents,” all of which had to have been stolen from the group I started in May 2000, “Mass. Citizens Alliance.”

(A new organization, “Mass Citizens for Marriage,” was required by state law to be organized last summer after the ballot petition was filed with the Secretary of State.)

I did not respond to the telephone calls from Bay Windows, including one from Epperly himself, because I was disappointed by this conduct.

I didn’t want to talk to Epperly at that point because I was upset with what they had done. Who wouldn’t be? I hope at some point that we can restore an atmosphere of trust. I expect and hope they will argue with us vigorously about the issues. That is what democracy is all about. My desire is to get back to the issues and not have this type of personal attack with talk about “anti-gay,” “right-wing,” etc.

Obviously, I am the main contributor to the organization, which is run independently by Bryan Rudnick, a very talented person, who has gotten the support of the vast majority of the citizens. This is what concerns the other side. They are becoming desperate. They know they will lose this issue if the people get to make the decision at the ballot box in 2004.

Everyone knows there are thousands and thousands of dedicated people who are contributing to this effort. They are the ones who should get the credit for making this possible.

Another large contributor was the Traditional Values Coalition, a group of over 43,000 churches across the country. They gave $100,000 to the effort. My contribution will be over $150,000. I obviously believe that marriage is very important to our society. And so do a majority of the people.

Globe Knew

Of course, the editors of the Globe noticed what was happening in Bay Windows, but they hoped that the petition would die. Their dream last summer was that Attorney General Tom Reilly would not approve it for the ballot. If he did, they were hoping it would not gather the 57,100 signatures that were necessary to get on the ballot.

After the petition was approved by the Attorney General and it became apparent that it was not only getting the required 57,100 signatures but was going way over-the-top, the Globe finally wrote a story on November 20.

It was large, on page one of Section B with the headline, “Battle over gay marriage petition gets ugly.” But it didn’t say that the only “ugly” part was that the opposition was violating the civil rights of citizens in a systematic plan by arguing right in their faces as they were signing the petition.

It was remarkable that none of the signers or the petition gatherers pushed or punched any of the harassers who were obviously using physical intrusion to cause trouble. If the harassers had been successful in starting violence, many say the Globe would have had large stories for months about the attacks against innocent homosexuals. That is what they were seeking.

They are ready to do anything to stop the people from voting on this. That is why we must expect a personal attack on me.

One of the ‘Greatest Generation’

So what am I trying to accomplish with this great effort of mine? I guess you might say it is a memorial to my roommate at Williams College, Jim Dolan, who died in Korea. Did he die in vain?

It is a conundrum that a member of the “Greatest Generation,” who served in the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II and was later drafted and sent to Korea at age 25 as a private in the Infantry, should receive flak from anyone.

(I never was in combat because both wars ended before I got there. But I was very close to many who were in Korea, including Jim. He was killed as a young second lieutenant when he volunteered to fly in a slow, unarmed L19 and tell the artillery whether their fire was on target.)

If you talk with anyone from the “Greatest Generation,” you will find that the vast majority of them agree with everything I write and encourage me to keep doing so. They know without any doubt that it was a different and better country before the 1960s.

There was an enormous difference between WWII (when almost every teenager was in the service) and Korea, which most college people were able to avoid. This caused many guys to have a twinge of guilt, although they didn’t deserve it. I never knew anyone in the service who wanted to go into combat, particularly in Korea. But if we were called, we did our best to serve.

This reality became really bad in the 1960s when the liberals dragged boys out of their homes for Vietnam.

(If you doubt that, you should have been with me in a prison stockade during the Korean War where I was a guard for two weeks watching the poor guys who were brought back by the FBI after they had gone AWOL to return to their homes. They were literally arrested in their homes.)

The trauma of Vietnam damaged an entire generation (which has never understood the issues) and our whole society. (The boys who went to WWII did not relish killing people any more than the boys of the 1960s. It was not a more “noble” war. Most of us just did our job and hoped that someone else would finish it before we got there.)

Whether the soul of our country will ever recover from that dark decade of the 1960s is open for conjecture. I would like to hope it is possible and that Jim Dolan did not give his life in vain.

If the present Massachusetts establishment disagrees with those of the “Greatest Generation,” it is their duty to tell us why. When you look at the painfully obvious problems that the Bill Clintons of the 1960s have brought to this country – especially to young children and teenagers – everyone must have doubts about the way they have us headed.

The flak I have received has even included rumors about my religion. I was baptized as a Presbyterian and have been attending a Congregational Church for the past twenty years.

All persons of good will must be concerned about personal attacks against someone who is spending his own time and money to help the vast majority of citizens and their desire to continue marriage as the foundation of our society.