Next Monday, the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention meets for the third time in two months to consider an amendment outlawing gay marriage. The coverage has been quiet in the interim, but from today’s Globe it looks like things are brewing behind the scenes at the State House:
State Senate President Robert E. Travaglini began drumming up support yesterday for a more “clear and precise” constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and create civil unions, amid signs that House Democrats loyal to Speaker Thomas M. Finneran will abandon the measure.
In a letter to lawmakers, Travaglini and Senate minority leader Brian P. Lees…wrote that the latest proposal represents “an effort to broaden this emerging consensus,” primarily by ensuring that the state would not be have to pay for federal benefits to same-sex couples once civil unions are established.
… In addition, the new text would make sure that benefits of those civil unions go to “persons,” and not “couples,” as the original says. “Many rights and protections belong to the individual, not the couple,” the letter says.
Travaglini and Lees are proposing to reword an earlier amendment that was sponsored by Finneran, but Finneran did not sign yesterday’s letter and did not sign on with Travaglini and Lees as a sponsor to the latest changes. That is fueling suspicion that the speaker no longer backs the amendment bearing his name.
I desperately wish the Globe pulled through a bit better with the news analysis. What’s going on? If anything, the new wording for the Travaglini-Lees amendment seems more hostile to equality for gay couples, even demoting the civil unions provision to an aggregate of individual rights - doesn’t that go against the whole point to begin with?
Yet Finneran, more conservative than Travaglini, cagily withdraws his support. It makes me suspect one more push from the anti-gay forces for squelching any civil unions provision or, at the very least, split the question into two separate ballot initiatives. I wonder why they think they have enough votes now. And has nothing been accomplished in the last two conventions if we’re seemingly back to square one?
Stay tuned…
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