Power surge

Last week's signing of two separate LGBT-rights related bills on the same day by Gov. Deval Patrick heralded a new era in LGBT political power on Beacon Hill, political observers say.

Indeed, the move was without precedent in the Commonwealth, despite the state's status as the first in the nation to offer full civil marriage rights to same-sex couples. Since 2004, the LGBT community has been on the defensive, fighting off anti-gay marriage amendments but making little forward progress. Prior to Patrick's July 31 signing of the repeal of the 1913 law and passage of the MassHealth Equality bill, it had been more than a decade since a Massachusetts governor had signed a piece of pro-gay legislation, when Gov. Bill Weld signed a gay hate crimes law in 1996. The only other significant pro-LGBT initiative to clear the legislature since then was the successful effort in 2006 to add an amendment to the state budget to create the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth, which survived a veto by Gov. Mitt Romney, and even that win was more of a defensive maneuver than an advance for LGBT rights; lawmakers created the commission after Romney threatened to disband its predecessor, the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

Both of the bills signed by Patrick last week are hugely significant: Repeal of the 1913 law opens up the state's borders to couples from all 49 other states to come to Massachusetts to receive a marriage license. And the MassHealth Equality bill requires the state to offer equal treatment to same-sex and heterosexual married couples in administering MassHealth, the state's Medicaid program. Both measures had languished in the legislature for much of the session, but House and Senate leadership, along with the governor, made it a priority to pass them in the frantic last days of the session, at a time when both chambers were swamped trying to get through budget veto overrides and a long list of other agenda items, including a health care cost containment bill that has massive implications for the state budget.

How did LGBT issues go to the top of the Beacon Hill agenda after more than a decade of being a virtual non-starter? Rep. Byron Rushing (D-Boston), a champion of LGBT rights in the legislature since the 1980s and a member of Speaker Sal DiMasi's leadership team, said the LGBT community is reaping the benefits of the massive organizing to defeat the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2007. Advocates and lawmakers successfully persuaded three-quarters of the House and Senate to vote against the amendment, and Rushing said that effort put LGBT issues on the map for a lot of lawmakers who previously may have given the issue little thought.

"The first thing and the overriding piece here is the legislature has significantly changed in its attitude toward gay and lesbian civil rights with the decision they had to make on marriage," said Rushing. "And so I think you can look at the Massachusetts legislature as pre- and post- the marriage vote in the constitutional convention. That was certainly the watershed, and it was the time virtually every legislator had to seriously reflect and study the question of gay and lesbian civil rights in Massachusetts."

He said advocates successfully framed both the 1913 repeal bill and the MassHealth Equality bill as unfinished business from the marriage vote.

"Then I think what you saw following that [vote on the marriage amendment] was the continued organizing. The advocates certainly built on that platform of support for marriage in what many people would see as legislation cleaning up in our general laws, what were just follow-ups of that decision on marriage," said Rushing.

Bolstering that argument is the vote count on the 1913 repeal bill, which is almost identical to the 2007 vote to defeat the marriage amendment. When the House voted on the 1913 repeal just three lawmakers defected from the pro-equality camp to vote against it. Seven lawmakers swung in the opposite direction, supporting repeal of the 1913 law after taking votes in support of the marriage amendment in 2007. (The Senate passed the 1913 law on a voice vote with no dissent, so there is no vote tally.)

Beyond efforts to pass legislation, Eleni Carr, vice-chair of the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth and chair of the commission's government relations committee, said the marriage amendment debate helped pave the way for the successful effort to increase funding for state LGBT youth programs. Lawmakers passed a Fiscal Year '09 budget that bumped funding for LGBT youth programs up by $300,000 - a more than 50 percent increase over the prior year. Lawmakers also increased funding for LGBT elder programs and domestic violence programs, as well as HIV/AIDS programs, all during a tight budget year when major funding increases were a rarity.

"There was almost a way that the marriage debate really just opened the door and opened everyone's eyes to how much discrimination and oppression our community faces," said Carr. "That was something I heard as a key thread whenever I talked to legislators; they'd say, I've been getting these horrible e-mails and calls. ... They got the miserable feeling that we have faced for a long time. ... It was all the more reason to actually fund programs to try to fight it."

Advocates and lawmakers said the marriage amendment fight had two other important consequences, both of which combined to give new momentum to this session's LGBT bills. It brought together the three most powerful people on Beacon Hill - Patrick, DiMasi, and Senate President Therese Murray - to coordinate strategy in favor of the pro-equality cause, and it also led to the expansion of the political clout and organizing power of MassEquality. The former consequence meant that for the first time unabashed allies of the LGBT community were setting the agenda on Beacon Hill; the latter meant that an organization that had built up an unprecedented level of political clout in the legislature was using that clout to bring long-neglected agenda items to the attention of key decision makers and rank-and-file lawmakers.

That combination helped move the MassHealth Equality bill, which LGBT Aging Project president Dale Mitchell said had gotten bogged down in the bureaucracy earlier in the session. For the second session in a row openly gay Rep. Liz Malia (D-Jamaica Plain) and a coalition of advocates representing the Aging Project, the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) and others were working to advance the bill, but by early 2008 the bill had stalled as the state Medicaid office and advocates debated the estimated cost to the state of providing full benefits to married same-sex couples. In 2008 MassEquality joined that coalition, having voted the previous year to morph from a campaign to preserve marriage equality to a multi-issue LGBT advocacy organization.

Aging Project director Lisa Krinsky said a couple months before the end of the session the coalition reached out to legislative leadership and the governor to get the issue moved up in the agenda. Malia and advocates made the case to DiMasi, Sen. Dianne Wilkerson reached out to Murray, and MassEquality helped set up a meeting between the coalition and Patrick's office. Mitchell said all of those efforts helped transform the MassHealth bill into a must-pass item, but he gave the lion's share of the credit to MassEquality.

"The contribution of MassEquality in terms of this bill getting through really needs recognition," said Mitchell. "The bill was stalled until MassEquality gave it its attention, and there were a number of factors that came into play. ... Certainly Liz Malia making it her number one commitment ... [and] Dianne Wilkerson's increasing involvement in LGBT issues in the Senate and the Senate President's support for [Wilkerson's] re-election campaign, all of those things were crucial for opening the door. But shoving it through, helping to get all the attention of the people we needed, was MassEquality."

Advocates and lawmakers described a similar pattern leading to the passage of the 1913 repeal bill. Rep. Robert Spellane (D-Worcester) had filed the first legislation to repeal the bill in 2004, and Patrick, DiMasi and Murray all supported those efforts, but LGBT advocates intentionally held off efforts to repeal it in 2008. Marc Solomon, executive director of MassEquality, said that advocates had agreed to wait to push the repeal until after the 2008 elections in deference to national Democratic leaders, who had helped swing crucial votes in the debate on the marriage amendment. They wanted to avoid making marriage into an issue that could harm Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Once California's Supreme Court issued its marriage equality ruling in May, Solomon said he began consulting with GLAD and Evan Wolfson at Freedom to Marry about moving on the 1913 law. By early June, when it became clear that California would go forward with issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples and that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was inviting couples from across the country to marry there, Solomon felt the time was ripe to strike down the laws preventing out-of-staters from marrying in Massachusetts. Solomon called Patrick and urged him to leverage his influence to kick-start the repeal process (sources from Patrick's office confirm the call took place but say Patrick was already working to try to repeal the 1913 law), and soon after Wilkerson and Murray in the Senate and DiMasi and Rushing in the House began strategizing to pass the bills before the end of the session.

"It was the big three, the governor, the speaker and the senate president" who championed the repeal bill, Solomon said.

Spellane said that having strong LGBT-friendly leaders in both chambers helped ensure that the 1913 bills were at the top of the agenda. He also said strong support from leadership helped drive fence-sitters on the issue into the pro-LGBT camp.

"At least on social issues, a strong supporter of gay rights, having that type of leader as your speaker is the main reason why this legislation was on the so-called fast track. ... And those people in the middle are the ones that need to feel comfortable with taking a vote. And when you have someone that's ideologically in support of something, in this case gay rights, those people are more likely to be supportive and come along with the ride, than if you had a leader who was not," said Spellane.

Rushing agreed. "I'm not sure if we would have been able to do what we did around marriage if we hadn't had a change in leadership," he said. "But what we see is that change in leadership has had an effect among all of our policies and any future stuff we would do around the issue of same-sex couples."

He added that MassEquality was also a key player in the passage of both bills. He said the relationships they have built up with lawmakers on the marriage issue and the strength of their grassroots network of supporters has forced lawmakers to take notice of the organization.

"I think MassEquality, the decision that it's made to continue its work in this area has just been very, very important for these things happening," said Rushing. "Now MassEquality's major asset is that they of course know all the legislators. So because they have such good relations with the majority of legislators and also that they have demonstrated that they are a bottom-up organization, that when they talk about advocacy, they are not simply talking about a staff of MassEquality but about all of the people who support these issues they organize."

Advocates point to other factors that led to the landmark success this session. Arline Isaacson, co-chair of the Caucus, said that the gains this session were products of gradual, decades-long efforts to change the conversation on Beacon Hill around LGBT rights.

"The Caucus, for example, has been lobbying for 35 years, and going from a handful of legislators supporting us to an overwhelming majority supporting us," said Isaacson. "And while I don't mean to suggest that the Caucus single-handedly did this all, because no one single-handedly did this all, but there has been a gradual but significant progress over the last 35 years in support of our community that's been very significant."

Malia also said part of the success has stemmed from gradual change in attitudes in the legislature, and one impetus for that change has been the visibility of openly LGBT lawmakers, like herself, former state senators Cheryl Jacques and Jarrett Barrios, and state Reps. Cheryl Coakley-Rivera, Sarah Peake and Carl Sciortino. "I think we've humanized [the issue in] the legislature in the past few years, and with us being LGBT folks a lot of the mythology has been lost and buried in a lot of the same way that it has in society at large in Massachusetts," said Malia.

The next big test of the new political climate on Beacon Hill will likely be the effort next year to pass a transgender-inclusive non-discrimination and hate crimes bill. The 1913 law repeal and the MassHealth bill passed in part because advocates and House and Senate leadership framed them as extensions of the marriage equality fight. It will be hard to make that same case when lobbying for non-discrimination and hate crimes laws, particularly when they affect a population with whom lawmakers have had comparatively little contact. The trans rights bill failed to gain traction this session, the first time it has been filed, and died in committee. Advocates plan to refile it next year, and it remains to be seen whether their political clout can boost LGBT-related legislation that is unrelated to marriage. Rushing said he is confident that advocates can frame the issue as a matter of civil rights to win over lawmakers as they did on the 1913 law and MassHealth

"I think the issue of civil rights is very high in people's consciousness at this point in the legislature, and as the non-discrimination law around transgender people is framed in that way I'm very hopeful that people will continue to think about these issues and for it to gain more support in the legislature," said Rushing.