Same-sex marriage in Massachusetts

Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in Massachusetts since May 17, 2004, as a result of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that it was unconstitutional under the Massachusetts constitution to allow only opposite-sex couples to marry. Massachusetts became the sixth jurisdiction in the world (after the Netherlands, Belgium, Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec) to legalize same-sex marriage. It was the first U.S. state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

In 1989, passing legislation first proposed in 1973, Massachusetts prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation in credit, public and private employment, union practices, housing, and public accommodation. In the decade that followed, political debate addressed same-sex relationships through two proxy issues: spousal benefits and parenting rights. Boston's City Council debated health insurance for the same-sex partners of city employees in May 1991 and Cambridge provided health benefits to the same-sex partners of its employees the following year. In 1992, Governor Bill Weld issued an executive order providing limited benefits for the same-sex partners of approximately 3,000 management-level state employees, covering only leave for family sickness and bereavement, far short of the health benefits LGBT activists were seeking, but probably the first state-level recognition of same-sex relationships. The Roman Catholic bishops of Massachusetts, replying in The Pilot, the newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese, said that Weld's "domestic partners" decision harms the common good "by making a special interest group equal to the family" and confuses "civil rights and family benefits". They asked: "Why should special recognition and assistance be given to friends who happen to share the same house?" Legislation to establish domestic partnerships that would carry spousal benefits was introduced annually in the state legislature without success. Its supporters focused on equal benefits and fairness rather than same-sex relationships themselves. In 1998, when the legislature passed a home rule petition allowing Boston to create such a status, Governor Paul Cellucci vetoed it because it applied to different-sex couples, which he thought undermined marriage, while he offered to sign legislation that applied to same-sex couples only. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's attempt to extend health care benefits to city employees' domestic partners by executive order, instead was successfully challenged by the Catholic Action League in court.

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Wikipedia