Jul 20, 2006  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

Gay rights advocates will continue to follow a strategy employing both litigation and legislation to win full marriage rights for gay couples in carefully selected states, according to a gay rights attorney considered the lead strategist for same-sex marriage.

Evan Wolfson, executive director of the same-sex marriage advocacy group Freedom To Marry, said bills calling for legal recognition of same-sex marriage are pending and have a chance of moving forward in California, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine.

At the same time, court cases seeking to overturn laws that ban same-sex marriage are awaiting a final ruling in California, Washington and New Jersey, and similar cases are moving through lower courts in Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland and Oklahoma.

In the past month, however, court rulings have gone against same-sex marriage in New York, Georgia, Nebraska, Tennessee and Arkansas, prompting some activists to question whether the litigation part of the strategy promoted by Wolfson should be reconsidered.

Supporters of a proposed federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage have cited court challenges to state marriage laws as one of the main reasons such an amendment is needed.

“What we need is more engagement, not less,” said Wolfson. “And I can honestly say that I have heard no leader, no organization, no funder, no pundit call for retreat or surrender,” he said, in discussing the litigation question.

As Wolfson tells it, the next round of court decisions likely will be far more favorable than those handed down during the past few weeks. And they will make the “media’s wave of ‘conventional wisdom’ about problems or the need to shift away from the courts seem misplaced,” he said.

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, have said they concur with Wolfson’s marriage strategy.

Activists from state gay rights groups have met regularly with Wolfson and officials from NGLTF, HRC and other national gay groups in private strategy sessions in New York and Washington, representatives of the groups have said.

Wolfson has declined to open the meetings to the press and public, saying it would be imprudent to disclose planning and strategy discussions to the well-funded organizations working to ban same-sex marriage through constitutional amendments on the state and federal level.

California, N.Y. best bets

On the legislative front, the California Legislature last year passed a gay marriage bill, becoming the first state ever to have adopted such legislation. The bill died after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it. But Democratic challenger Phil Angelides, who has promised to sign a gay marriage bill, could defeat Schwarzenegger in November.

In New York, state Attorney General Eliott Spitzer, who also supports equal marriage rights for gays, is expected to win election as New York’s next governor in November. If Democrats win control of the New York Senate, that state could pass a marriage bill in the next two years.

Wolfson said if gays win the right to marry in the nation’s two most populous states, it would have an enormous impact on the nation as a whole.

Toni Broaddus, of the Equality Federation, a network of statewide gay rights groups, said member groups in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine were actively pushing marriage bills. She said efforts would likely take longer in those states than in California and New York, but supporters were hopeful that bills in the three states would be actively considered.

She said she expects gay-supportive state legislators to drop more same-sex marriage bills in the hoppers of other states. However, the marriage legislation in some of these states would be more symbolic, giving supporters a chance to begin promoting equal marriage rights for gays without a realistic chance of seeing it pass anytime soon.

In Connecticut, same-sex marriage advocates vowed to continue their push in the state legislature for a gay marriage bill last year immediately after the legislature enacted into law a civil unions law.