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Goodridge Decision Spawns Action

By Kevin Adler
July 21, 2004

Although the average American might feel that same-sex marriages in Massachusetts materialized overnight, activists who have worked on the issue say that the Goodridge decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) in November 2003 was not a complete surprise. Goodridge was the result of a well-planned, long-term strategy by same-sex marriage proponents to bring the issue into the legal, cultural, and political mainstream.

Massachusetts has long been recognized as a promising state for testing America's historic opposition to same-sex marriages. Two aspects of Massachusetts law that are found in combination in only a few states were cited by the Goodridge court: the lack of a clear prohibition against same-sex marriages; and strong laws requiring equal protection under the law for homosexuals.

“A major strategy of same-sex marriage advocates has been to find one state to agree with their proposition, and then to have people come there and get married, and then return to their home state and take advantage of the choice-of-law provision,” said Robert A. Destro, principal investigator of the Marriage Law Center at Catholic University (Washington, DC). “Massachusetts had long been singled out as a good candidate state.”

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