At midnight, gay marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts.

01:20 AM EDT on Sunday, May 16, 2004

BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer

Tomorrow morning, inside the Arlington Street Church in Boston, two middle-aged men will exchange marriage vows. Their children, friends and the world media will bear witness to a new era.

Robert Compton and David Wilson, one of seven couples to successfully challenge Massachusetts' constitutional laws of equality, will present the minister with a marriage license issued hours earlier at City Hall. And with the reverend's signature, Massachusetts will become the first state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

The other six couples named in the landmark case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, also will marry in ceremonies scheduled throughout the day. Those events will be followed by celebrations by supporters who will mark tomorrow as a milestone victory in a long battle for equal civil rights for homosexuals, and by a rally by opponents who will define the day as a moral assault on marriage.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl This spring, Thom Simonin, left, and Derek Belt, of Attleboro, say they plan to get married "again." They had a commitment ceremony seven years ago.

While history unfolds on several public stages, Thom Simonin, 37, and his partner of nine years, Derek Belt, 44, will quietly visit their city hall in Attleboro and pick up their marriage license.

Tomorrow evening they plan a small dinner party with friends in their duplex off Route 1 to commemorate the day.

"It's not that we're trying to make the ultimate political statement" by getting married, says Simonin, a registered nurse at the Oakland Grove Health Care Center, in Woonsocket. "We're doing this to protect each other."

"I don't think about the historical precedence of it at all," says Belt, who teaches eighth-grade English in Fall River. "It's just a step in my relationship with Thom. It provides legal remedies I can use to look out for him. That's my goal in life."

Their marriage, scheduled for later this spring, will be their second as they see it.

Their first, in 1997, expressed their commitment to each other. This time, they marry for the rights they've been denied.

Simple, basic rights, Belt says. The right, for example, to visit Simonin in the hospital as his spouse if ever he falls ill. The right to freely inherit what each now owns jointly if one should die.

On a warm late afternoon, both men, dressed in shorts and golf shirts, sit close on their living room couch.

Belt, who usually prepares supper, has chicken in the oven. Simonin, who had the day off, spent much of it ripping up dead grass in the backyard and preparing the soil for reseeding. Hopefully, it will be lush and green in time for their home wedding.

"We're calling it a renewal of vows," says Belt.

"As far as we're concerned," adds Simonin, "we were married September 12, 1997."

The organist at Murray Unitarian Universalist Church played "Ave Maria." A friend led 85 guests in singing the prayer of St. Francis. Belt's sister-in law read from Corinthians:

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. . . . Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; . . . Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. . . ."

Each of the 10 members in the wedding party, including five women, wore tuxedos.

"The women loved it because they didn't have to go out and buy a dress," says Simonin. "All they had to do was rent a tux."

WHILE MANY churches have opposed same-sex marriages and have asked their clergy not to officiate at them now, the Unitarian church has performed same-sex ceremonies for 30 years.

Now, as gay marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts, many Bay State Unitarian churches are being swamped with wedding requests.

"I think many people want to do it as soon as possible," said the Rev. Sandra D. Fitz-Henry of Murray Unitarian in Attleboro, who officiated at Belt and Simonin's 1997 ceremony. "There is a sense that the window may close suddenly, so there is a little bit of a sense of needing to do this immediately."

As it is, residents must wait three days to marry after receiving a license unless they win a court waiver. All the plaintiffs in the Goodridge case are expected to win waivers tomorrow morning allowing for their marriages the same day. The first big rush of same-sex weddings is expected Thursday.

At the Arlington Street Church, "We have about 30 couples so far coming in and the phone is ringing off the hook," said the Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie. "It's just completely thrilling."

LAST NOV. 18, a divided Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that "barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution."

Writing for the court majority, Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall said the state's Constitution "forbids the creation of second-class citizens." The ban on gay marriage, like an earlier ban on interracial marriage, she said, smacked of prejudice.

"The right to marry means little if it does not include the right to marry the person of one's choice," Marshall wrote. ". . . Without the right to marry, one is excluded from the full range of human experience and denied full protection of the laws."

Gay-rights supporters rejoiced. Opponents charged that the court had overstepped its authority in redefining a centuries-old understanding of marriage. Governor Romney pledged to fight for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union between a man and a woman.

Reverberations from the decision would spread across the country.

In February, municipal officials in San Francisco, emboldened by the Massachusetts ruling, began issuing marriage licenses. Officials in Oregon, New York and New Jersey followed suit until court orders stopped them.

And President Bush, vowing to protect the "sacred institution" of marriage, would call for a federal constitutional amendment.

Meanwhile, in Attleboro, as last year's Supreme Judicial Court's ruling filled the local afternoon news, Derek Belt sat at his kitchen counter waiting for Thom Simonin to return home from work.

As Simonin walked in through the door, Belt asked the question.

"Will you marry me again?"

"Sure," Simonin replied.

BELT AND SIMONIN both grew up Catholic: Belt in Attleboro, where he attended Bishop Feehan High School, and Simonin in upstate New York. By his teenage years, Simonin knew he was gay.

"It was just something you had to hide," he says on another recent evening. "I was terrified what my parents would think and how other kids would treat me."

Many classmates guessed. They teased him relentlessly.

Belt acknowledged his homosexuality when he was 20.

In 1995 they met for coffee at Cafe Zog on Wickenden Street in Providence. Neither had much time for a relationship. Belt was taking teaching classes; Simonin was attending nursing school.

But after that first date, "I just knew we were going to end up together, eventually," Belt says. "We both shared the same values about family and friendships. We like to just sit here and talk. We're basically homebodies."

Finding someone to love -- and marry -- "was something as a gay person you always hoped for," Simonin says, "but you never thought it was really ever going to happen."

THE SUPREME Judicial Court gave Massachusetts legislators 180 days to amend state law to comply with its decision.

Many elected officials, including Romney, hoped that adoption of civil unions would qualify as compliance. Vermont had adopted such an arrangement in 2000 after its Supreme Court ruled that gay couples were entitled to all the rights marriage offered.

But appeasement failed. In February the court ruled civil unions would still be discriminatory under the Massachusetts Constitution.

Lawmakers did, however, still pass a civil-union bill. If approved again next year by the legislature, lawmakers could ask voters in 2006 to amend the state Constitution limiting 'marriage to heterosexuals.

Opponents to same-sex marriage filed several last-ditch efforts to stop same-sex marriages. All failed.

On Thursday a federal judge denied a request for a restraining order by a group calling itself the Liberty Counsel, which argued that the court had usurped the lawmakers' power by redefining marriage.

Meanwhile, Romney threw up a roadblock to prevent the kind of run on marriage licenses as seen in San Francisco.

Romney said he would enforce a 1913 law that prohibits out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts if their marriage would be void in their home state.

Thirty-nine other states have so-called defense-of-marriage acts that define marriage as the union between a man and a woman.

Legislation now before the Rhode Island General Assembly would add the Ocean State to that list. For now, however, the question of whether Rhode Island would honor a same-sex marriage conducted in Massachusetts remains unclear. Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch is expected to issue an interpretation of the state's marriage law tomorrow.

In light of Romney's edict, several clerks in nearby Massachusetts communities say they will ask all couples starting tomorrow to see a driver's license as proof of residency before issuing a marriage license.

If a couple is from out of state, Attleboro City Clerk Susan Flood says, she will not issue a license.

"I'm just trying to abide by the law. I'm going to treat everyone the same."

However, if a couple refuses or can't show proof of residency, Flood says, "I'll probably take their word" that they live in state, since the license also asks couples to sign, at the risk of perjury, that they are now or will be Massachusetts residents.

"I'm not going to be militaristic about it," Flood said.

Seekonk Town Clerk Jan Parker says the new residency rules "put us in a tough situation as clerks."

"The state says don't issue [a license] if they don't live in the state. Yet if they don't show proof of residency and still want the license, we are to point out the waiver, which says the marriage will be null and void" if they lie.

Clerks in Worcester, Provincetown and Somerville have announced they will defy Romney's directives and issue licenses to out-of-state couples.

Leaders of the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the group that represented the plaintiffs in the Goodridge case, have instructed gay couples not to obtain licenses under false pretenses. Doing so, they say, could place a legal cloud over the marriage.

IN RHODE ISLAND, gay-rights advocates doubt large numbers of out-of-state couples will rush cross the border to marry.

"I think most people's position here is: I want to get married but in my home state," said Kate Monteiro, president of the Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights.

The Rev. Richelle Russell of the Providence First Unitarian Church says she and her partner of 14 years would like to marry but "we're not interested in breaking the law."

"Sometimes I feel like Martin Lurther King in jail," she said. "We have been waiting a very long time."

But eventually, she said, Rhode Island will legalize same-sex marriage.

"Rhode Island has a unique and proud history for being a safe refuge for different kinds of people and differing viewpoints. So my hope and prediction is that mean-spirited laws that single out a particular group for discrimination will no longer be appropriate."

The Rev. Steven Landale of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Providence says many people who haven't taken a position on gay rights "are still wary" about same-sex marriage.

"But when you start rattling off the legal rights which married straight couples enjoy that are not afforded gay couples -- the question of inheritance rights, of raising the children you have been raising without the inlaws taking them from you -- I think people start coming around.

"When people see gay and lesbian couples being married and the sky doesn't fall down and it doesn't lead to chaos, I think many people in the middle on this issue will come around."

JOANNE McOsker, of North Kingstown, prays that doesn't happen.

"I think it's a very, very sad day for Massachusetts," said McOsker, a member of Rhode Island Catholics for Life. "This has nothing to do with civil rights, nothing whatsoever. It's an evil."

"Two or three percent of the population are forcing their moral views on the rest of society," McOsker said. "We're going to oppose God's clear law that is so observable in nature. It is totally wrong and will only bring sorrow and suffering for everyone. Especially for the children. It's devastating."

But most opponents to same-sex marriage are resigned to tomorrow.

On Thursday Roman Catholic Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, of Boston, issued a statement reminding Catholics that "our sadness at what has happened should not lead us into anger against, or vilification of, any group of people, especially our homosexual brothers and sisters."

Rep. Philip Travis, the Rehoboth Democrat who sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, says: "We've tried every avenue legally available to us to reverse the decision and we haven't been successful. It's the law of the land now. You may not like it, and I'm not crazy about it, but we abide by the law in a civilized society."

The decision will have consequences," Travis said. "There is no other homosexuality in nature. When you go against nature, it will come back at you. There is a price we will pay for that lifestyle. Higher health costs. It will be compounded."

THOM SIMONIN and Derek Belt are planning a smaller wedding this time -- an intimate gathering of about 15 friends in their home.

They have ordered white roses to decorate their living room and have hired a caterer who will serve lamb appetizers and champagne.

The Rev. Ms. Fitz-Henry from Murray Unitarian will once again officiate.

Belt's godchild will stand up for him as she did in 1997.

They won't say when their wedding will happen.

Legal discrimination may end tomorrow, they say, but bigotry persists.