Twenty years ago today, two moms received the first marriage license deliberately issued to a same-sex couple in the United States. They were accompanied by their daughter and by the attorney (another another queer mom) who had led the landmark case for marriage equality. Let’s take a further look at how parents and the welfare of children helped accomplish this milestone.
The Motivation of Children
GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), the organization where Bonauto worked (and is now the senior director of civil rights and legal strategies), related this story about Hillary and Julie Goodridge, the lead plaintiffs whose name was attached to the case and who received that first license:
For Hillary Goodridge, an experience in a hospital also crystallized her understanding of the need for legal protections for LGBTQ+ families. After Julie gave birth to their daughter under harrowing circumstances, Hillary wasn’t allowed to visit baby Annie in the NICU because she and Julie had no legal relationship. Finally, she told the hospital that she was Julie’s sister so she could see her own daughter. A few years later, they heard from friends about the case that Mary Bonauto and GLAD were putting together and realized that they could help.
Hillary Goodridge clarified to NPR in 2019, “It’s not like that happened and we thought, ‘We have to sue for marriage equality.’ ” Later, however, “that was one of the memories that motivated them to find a way to formalize their relationship,” NPR reported—adding, “the immediate impetus was a simple question from 3-year-old Annie: ‘If you love each other, then why aren’t you married?'”
Bonauto, who was the mother of twins herself, gathered a total of seven plaintiff couples to take on the challenge of marriage equality. Four of the seven were parents themselves: Maureen Brodoff and Ellen Wade, who had a 12-year-old daughter when the case was filed in April 2001; Gary Chalmers and Richard Linnell, who had an 8-year-old daughter; Heidi Norton and Gina Smith (now Nortonsmith), who had two sons, ages five years and one year, and the Goodridges, whose daughter was 5 by that point. Non-parent plaintiffs were Gloria Bailey and Linda Davies; Michael Horgan and David Balmelli; and David Wilson and Robert Compton.
Plaintiff Gina Nortonsmith told GLAD last fall why she participated in the case:
I wanted our kids to have the same safety and security in their family as other kids, and I believed that the constitution included us and that I could be part of making that movement toward our inclusion happen. I’m proud that our sons live in a world where they know their parents stood up for the right of people to love whomever they love.
The argument for children clearly resonated. Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall included children in the first paragraph of her ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (PDF):
Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations.
and then concluded, among other things:
Protecting the welfare of children is a paramount State policy. Restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples, however, cannot plausibly further this policy…. But the task of child rearing for same-sex couples is made infinitely harder by their status as outliers to the marriage laws….
In this case, we are confronted with an entire, sizeable class of parents raising children who have absolutely no access to civil marriage and its protections because they are forbidden from procuring a marriage license. It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents’ sexual orientation….
The State’s refusal to accord legal recognition to unions of same-sex couples has had the effect of creating a system in which children of same-sex couples are unable to partake of legal protections and social benefits taken for granted by children in families whose parents are of the opposite sex. The continued maintenance of this caste-like system is irreconcilable with, indeed, totally repugnant to, the State’s strong interest in the welfare of all children and its primary focus, in the context of family law where children are concerned, on “the best interests of the child.”
In the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell decision that made marriage equality federal law, the majority of the plaintiffs were again parents, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, stressed the negative impact of marriage inequality on children as a reason for change.
As I’ve written before, parenthood is not the only reason to marry, nor should marriage be necessary for parental rights—but marriage is a societal touchstone, weighted with meaning, rights, and responsibilities for adults and children alike. And the fact that children featured so prominently in marriage cases says much about the progress of LGBTQ equality. No longer were we simply arguing that LGBTQ equality wouldn’t harm children; we were arguing that it would help them.
The Goodridges divorced less than five years after their marriage, in part because of the trauma they experienced from the “pressure to be perfect” while standing in the spotlight, as NPR reported in a sympathetic 2019 piece. The right to marry, however, includes the right to divorce, with all of the attendant laws that help such ruptures happen as equitably as possible, and with emphasis placed on the best interests of any children from the marriage. To my mind, no one should criticize them for their divorce; it makes me only more humbled by and grateful for what they went through in order to move equality forward for all of us.
A Personal Connection
When my son was born, marriage equality did not exist anywhere in the U.S. I started this blog when he was two, just over a year after the first couples in Massachusetts began to marry, but my spouse Helen and I were living in New York at the time—and Massachusetts initially said that only same-sex couples residing in Massachusetts could wed there.
When Helen got a new job in Massachusetts at the end of 2006, her new company no longer offered health insurance for unmarried same-sex partners, post-marriage equality, so we had to marry for me to be covered. We were still living in New York while we looked for housing, however, and weren’t sure if we’d be allowed to wed until we moved. Luckily, the court accepted Helen’s job-offer letter as proof of “intent to reside,” and let us proceed. We therefore planned for and had our wedding in the span of two weeks—and like to joke about our “shotgun wedding” after 13 years together. November 18th happened to fit our schedules—and by pure coincidence, was three years to the day after the Goodridge decision had been issued. (The actual marriages started six months later, hence our May celebration today.) Our son, who was three at the time, stood by our sides. And yes, we were one of the many couples to use the initial quote from Marshall’s decision as part of our ceremony.
Those were uncertain times still: Half a year later, the Massachusetts legislature debated sending marriage equality to the voters, but then voted resoundingly against it. And we continued filing our federal income tax as single (also filling out a “dummy” federal form as married that enabled us to complete our married Massachusetts form) until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Windsor decision allowed us to file federally as married.
And Onward
Today is also the The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, marking the anniversary of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) decision in 1990 to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. It is also the anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which said that racial segregation of public schools is unconstitutional. As we look back on all of our progress today, however, we must also look ahead.
Massachusetts has now had marriage equality for 20 years, and all other states for at least nine (give or take a month). Support has continued to grow, as this Gallup poll shows. But U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs, the 2022 decision that overturned abortion rights, made it clear that some conservatives are aiming to restrict or overturn the right to marriage equality, although the majority opinion tried to reassure us otherwise.
Add to that the fact that even after 20 years of marriage equality, children of LGBTQ parents and those born via assisted reproduction still do not have clear and equitable ways of securing legal parentage ties, even in Massachusetts, among other states. And even married nongestational parents are still advised to secure their parentage with co-parent adoptions, court orders, or the equivalent, in case their parentage is not recognized when they travel or move.
We still have work to do.
Have a piece of cake today, then, or raise a glass in celebration of marriage equality and in honor of all the LGBTQ parents, children of LGBTQ parents, other LGBTQ people, and allies who worked and sacrificed to accomplish it (including, perhaps, yourself). Then recommit to doing what you can to keep bending the arc of justice.