What Should We Do Now about Marriage?

Michael Dukakis and John Kerry Were Disturbed in 2002 when Our Democracy Was Spit Upon by the Legislature, and by Margaret Marshall and Pinch Sulzberger;
Marshall's Conscience Is Bothered Every Time She Sees the Pawlicks Because She Knows She Did Wrong
By Attorney J. Edward Pawlick
December 10, 2003

     People as diverse as John Kerry and Michael Dukakis were disturbed when Margaret Marshall and Pinch Sulzberger teamed together in 2002 to bypass our democracy in order to continue their plan for gay marriage.
     When Kerry was asked by Meet the Press on Sunday, June 23, 2002, whether a vote should be taken the next time when the Protection of Marriage Amendment came before the Legislature on July 17, he told Tim Russert: "I think people always deserve a right to vote, and if you have a referendum process, Tim, people have a right to exercise it."
     When Dukakis was informed, on the afternoon of July 17, 2002 by a MassNews reporter, Ed Oliver, as the former Governor was entering the State House, that the Legislature had just adjourned without taking a vote on the Protection of Marriage Amendment, Dukakis replied that they should have been allowed to vote.
      Of course, those two men didn't understand the full details of what was happening. No one did. But they knew in their gut that something was terribly wrong.
     None of this bothered the protectors of our civil liberties from Harvard Law School, such as Allen Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe. They didn't really care what happened to our civil liberties as long as their pet projects with a liberal agenda were moving forward. Even though this blatant travesty was happening right under their noses in their own state, in the city right next to Harvard, either they didn't notice or they didn't care. It is uncertain which would be worse.
     Any intelligent lawyer knows that when delegates came together from all over Massachusetts in 1917-1918 to write a new Constitution, one of the biggest struggles was determining how it would be amended in the future.
     Before then, any changes had to be separately approved by each part of the Legislature, both Senate and House. A majority of the 21-man, conservative Senate could block any attempt at reform. The liberals wanted to change that. They wanted the people to be able to amend the Constitution by a majority vote in a referendum. But the conservatives had a legitimate concern. The Constitution wasn't intended to be changed at every whipstitch. It was the foundation of our society. If it were too easily changed, we could end up with a sort of mob-rule. Therefore, after much spirited but proper debate, they arrived at a solution which satisfied everyone.
     Since then, all amendments have to be ratified by the people at the ballot. There is simply no other way to have an amendment approved.
     In 2002, the immediate problem was how to get the Protection of Marriage Amendment to the people for their vote even though the liberals (mostly Democrats), were in total and complete control of the Massachusetts Legislature and refused to let that happen. Not only did they control the Legislature, they were in turn controlled by the one newspaper that dominates the news media across the country, and particularly in Massachusetts, the New York Times Company, also owner of the Boston Globe.
     As if that weren't enough, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Margaret Marshall, was working with the Times through her husband, the preeminent, liberal/radical columnist for the Times, Anthony Lewis, to implement gay marriage. As a result, when Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage sued in August 2002 to force the Legislature to obey the Constitution and vote, Marshall's court agreed in December 2002 that the people at the State House had violated the Constitution. But she held there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it.

Marshall's Conscience Was Bothered
     You can now understand why every one of the four times that I appeared before Marshall's court from October 2002 to May 2003, some little spark inside her wanted to get me out of there as quickly as possible. I was embarrassing to her. I was her conscience come to life. Why was I so polite and intelligent-looking? Why wasn't I wild and crazy as her husband, Tony Lewis, had told her that all conservatives are? (I may have been the first conservative she had ever seen.) In fact, Tony was the one who looked that part, didn't he? And why did my wife, Sally, a Wellesley college graduate and President of Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage, have to have the same sane image? Besides, I might actually get one of Marshall's Justices upset over the whole thing if they heard me enough.
     Marshall knows that when the delegates finally adjourned in 1918, they had established two ways to get a new amendment before the people for a vote. One was to gather signatures as MCM and Sally had done. The other was to have a legislator introduce an Amendment for the members to approve or disapprove.
     Where the people have gone out and gotten signatures, the proposed amendment must be approved by only 25% of both the Senate and the House meeting jointly as one body, with the President of the Senate in charge of the session. (The meeting is popularly known as a Constitutional Convention although the Constitution itself does not use that or any other word. It merely refers to it as a joint session.)
     The Legislature meets for two years in each session. Any amendment must always receive the approval of two consecutive sessions before it can go on the ballot. The first two-year session that MCM was dealing with began in January 2001 and ended in December 2002. The next session was from January 2003 to December 2004.
     That is why MCM asked Justice Marshall to do something, anything, in the fall of 2002 to stop this destruction of our representative government. I am not a constitutional lawyer. That session of the Legislature was about to expire. I am no expert. The SJC is the guardian of our rights and our liberties. If not them, who else will protect us?
     Although Art. IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution guarantees each and every state a democratic form of government, federal judge Patti Saris, a former employee of Ted Kennedy, made it clear that justice will not be found for conservatives in the Boston federal courthouse.
     If Justice Marshall could think of nothing else she could do, it was clear that the Legislature of 2001-2002 had abandoned and forfeited their right to vote and was also derelict in their duty to vote on the Marriage Amendment. Of course, that didn't bother Marshall.

Gay Marriage Would Be Outlawed in 2004
     If Marshall had sent this Amendment on to the Legislature in 2002 as we had requested in our original suit, MCM and Sally would have had only the hurdle of one more session to overcome, the one that goes from 2003 to the end of 2004.
     They obviously would win 25% of that vote and would get on the ballot in November 2004. That would be "check" and "checkmate" for Margaret Marshall and Pinch Sulzberger. No matter what they might do, the juggernaut of gay marriage would be dead in this country.
     Those people who wanted to do their thing with other members of their sex would go on quietly doing it behind closed doors, and the rest of us could go back to enjoying our children and grandchildren without having this foolish habit dominate so much of our media.
     Of course, the public health problems would remain and threaten us all, the same as are evident with any other venereal disease, but perhaps we would be able to talk about them dispassionately without the father-and-son team who run the New York Times, Pinch and Punch Sulzberger, airing their family disputes about homosexuality before all of us.


 


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