URGED TO FIGHT

Catholics urged to fight gay marriage
Bishop, Bork try to mobilize lawyers
By Ralph Ranalli and John McElhenny, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, 1/12/2004

A call to fight the legalization of gay marriage was issued by several prominent voices yesterday, including Boston Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley and former US Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork, who strongly urged the state's Catholic lawyers and judges to oppose last year's historic decision by the state Supreme Judicial Court.

O'Malley made his remarks during the annual Red Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, an event named for the scarlet vestments worn during a service to bless the work of lawyers and judges.

"We cannot afford to be asleep at the switch. We cannot afford to run for cover. Today, at this Red Mass, I call on you, our Catholic lawyers and jurists, to live your baptismal commitment," O'Malley said. "Your baptism and your profession invest you with a great responsibility. Use your wisdom to defend the truth, to defend marriage. Do it with a passion and do what is right."

Later, at a luncheon sponsored by the Catholic Lawyers' Guild, Bork, a former US attorney general, warned that the US Supreme Court appeared to be on track to issue a national decision similar to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's November ruling.

Bork, the author of several books, including "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," said that the country has entered a new age of judicial activism that is eroding the government's traditional separation of powers.

He charged that the split 4-to-3 decision to legalize gay marriage in the case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health would have been "inconceivable" to John Adams, the architect of the Massachusetts constitution, and said the ruling was based on "arguments that did not rise above the quality of a late-night philosophy session in a dormitory."

"The 4-to-3 majority decided that the judicial power is also the power to make public policy," Bork said. "We are no longer a government of laws, but one of four lawyers wearing robes."

Margaret Williams, interim executive director of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, said O'Malley's comments were no surprise because the Catholic Church had made clear its opposition to gay marriage.

"Bishop O'Malley has the right to represent the views of the Catholic Church, but this is not about the Catholic Church," she said. "It's about the rights and freedoms under the Massachusetts Constitution. For us, this is not an issue of religious marriage. It's an issue of what is right in the American justice system. The separation of church and state should be very clear."

Later in the day, at a Faneuil Hall assembly sponsored by Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran also decried the "judicial tyranny" of the courts.

Finneran, an abortion rights opponent who was the assembly's keynote speaker, said, "It is that unelected branch of government that is far more dangerous than anything the elected branch could do."

O'Malley, who also attended the Citizens for Life assembly, urged the lawyers during the Red Mass to emulate St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers, who was executed by King Henry VIII for his support of marriage and his opposition to divorce.

"We live in an age when our hubris has made us blind to the madness around us, where our courts have undermined the value of life itself and now attempt to dilute the meaning of marriage," O'Malley said. "In diluting the meaning of marriage, we risk diminishing our own humanity."

O'Malley also warned that gay marriage would erode the traditional connection between marriage and child rearing.

"The prevalence of divorce and cohabitation in the last decades has done great harm to the institution of marriage, by taking the focus off children. Same-sex marriages will only further the tendency to only see marriage as being for the good of the adult without taking into account the children and their interests."

Retired state Supreme Judicial Court Justice Joseph R. Nolan, the president of the lawyers' guild, said O'Malley's exhortation was well-received by members. "It was good, we need to do something," said Nolan. "I was on that court for 14 years, then I left and then they came up with that abomination."

The crowd included some of the church's most stalwart legal defenders, including Wilson Rogers Jr. and his son, Wilson Rogers III, who for years defended the church against civil complaints of sexual abuse, and Thomas H. Hannigan Jr., the Boston attorney hired by O'Malley to negotiate last year's historic $85 million settlement with more than 500 alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse.

The Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the church's lobbying arm, handed out fliers at the luncheon urging lawyers to call their state senators and representatives to support the Marriage Affirmation and Protection Amendment, a constitutional measure that proponents say would reverse the Goodridge decision and define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

At the Citizens for Life assembly at Faneuil Hall, several speakers addressed the topic of gay marriage, including Tom Shields, chairman of The Coalition for Marriage, which is promoting the constitutional amendment.

"Gays and lesbians have the right to live as they choose, but they do not have the right to redefine marriage for our entire society," Shields said.