AN ATTORNEY GENERAL IS, in essence, the state’s lawyer. He or she gives legal counsel to government organizations, prosecutes criminals, and defends the government against lawsuits. One would hope that an attorney general would see the public aspect of the job to be explaining the law evenhandedly to citizens.

Sadly, a June 21 Commentary piece by Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Patrick Lynch (“My ruling on Mass. same-sex ties”) reads more like the legal legerdemain of an activist.

A specific example, nicely consolidating the flaws in Lynch’s reasoning, comes with his dismissal of an April 4 piece by Joseph Cavanagh and Lincoln Oliphant (“Lynch is absurd on same-sex marriage”): “Even my vociferous critics, who are attempting to reincarnate a discriminatory, post-Civil War law recently rejected by a Massachusetts court, must admit that Rhode Island protects same-sex couples in housing, employment, health care and adoption.”

The statute to which Lynch is referring was enacted into the Massachusetts General Laws in 1913 and prevents out-of-staters from contracting marriages there if they “would be void if contracted in” their home states.

Despite the scrutiny of Massachusetts marriage law since the Supreme Judicial Court created a right to same-sex marriage with its Goodridge decision a few years ago, the genesis of the law is uncertain, although it seems to be related to a proposal by a national Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, in 1912, which cited not only interracial marriages, but also marriages by minors whose parents disapproved and marriages following closely on divorces.

The Civil War reference therefore is at least questionable and at most a gratuitous ploy to raise the emotional specter of racism, even slavery.

Indeed, the keystone of Lynch’s own legal argument — a Rhode Island Supreme Court ruling from 1904 — was even more proximate to the war.

Moreover, that case, Ex Parte Chase, validated a marriage that was contracted in Massachusetts in order to evade Rhode Island’s guardianship laws. In other words, it isn’t inconceivable that the 1913 statute was in some small way a reaction to the 1904 ruling.

Lynch’s statement that the Massachusetts judiciary “recently rejected” the law goes beyond gratuity to misinformation. In its Cote-Whitaker rulings, the Massachusetts Superior Court found Rhode Island to be the only contested state in which the statute didn’t apply, without invalidating the law itself. The court simply determined that no “constitutional amendment, statute, or controlling appellate decision from Rhode Island . . . explicitly deems void or otherwise expressly forbids same-sex marriage.”

The studious omission of the court’s ruling — which Lynch exacerbates through utter silence — is that Rhode Island’s marriage laws, from the parties that may apply for licenses to the degrees of relation that are considered illegal incest, are gender-specific. The problem is one that is sure to pop up whenever a court declares the English language to be void, as the SJC did with Goodridge: We imaginative creatures can concoct all sorts of things that are not explicitly stated in the law for the reason that nobody ever believed that they had to be. By its own analysis, it would seem that the Massachusetts judiciary would have to conclude that Rhode Island does not forbid men from marrying their fathers, grandfathers, and sons.

The crucial consideration that advocates for same-sex marriage typically ignore is that the question (particularly the legal question) has less to do with whether Rhode Island has a “strong public policy against homosexuals,” in Lynch’s words, than with marriage and what sort of relationship it is meant to indicate and encourage.

That is why it is inaccurate for Lynch to claim that his opinion was “nothing more than a simple recitation” of Chase. Nobody disputed, then or now, that the Chases could have been married in Rhode Island if their guardians had approved. In other words, the type of relationship into which they entered in Massachusetts already existed in Rhode Island, unlike same-sex marriage.

The most broadly objectionable and inattentive aspect of Patrick Lynch’s public commentary on the issue is his uncharitable assumption that opposition to same-sex marriage is, beneath it all, opposition to “those whom we may not like.” Ending his piece with these words, our attorney general proves that, while he may now speak of his ruling’s outcome as objectively unavoidable, his attitude is just as much that of an activist as on that day in February when he issued it.

By Rhode Island statute, when faced with civil-rights violations, the attorney general’s recourse is to “bring a civil action for injunctive or other appropriate equitable relief” — that is, bring it to the courts. Instead, at a time when the General Assembly had legislation addressing the matter on the table and the judiciary was wrestling with a related question, Lynch ran to the press saying, “The Board of Education was threatening to deny people basic rights. I wasn’t going to wait.” That is not the language of a legal adviser, in which capacity Lynch offered his analysis.

One must make allowances for the difficulty that some public figures have tempering their showmanship. Still, Patrick Lynch’s various statements and explanations have the distinctive flare of foregone conclusions, not based on precedent, but on his personal opinion.

Justin Katz is administrator of anchorrising.com, a public-policy-discussion Web site.