A local gay rights activist launched a publicity stunt that became so much more. Congress couldn't help but notice
, from which this article is adapted.
registered license agents scattered across Hawaii, including government officials and even employees of large resort hotels that catered to wedding parties, but Woods, with an eye towards dramatic confrontation, selected the most highly trafficked of the available locations. What they had done was set in motion a chain of events that would send a novel legal question from the outskirts of the American imagination to the floor of Congress and the Oval Office in a little more than five years. Within a quarter-century, the U.S. Supreme Court would end the debate for good. Over many of the years in between, whether gays and lesbians should be permitted to marry was the most divisive social question in the country.
would defend “family planning, civil rights for all people, pro-choice in abortion, child care programs, freedom of speech and religion, and the separation of church and state.” When he held a rally outside the state capitol in Honolulu, Falwell was confronted by a sheriff presenting him with a summons: the Moral Majority of Hawaii was suing his Moral Majority, Inc. for using its name.
Nonetheless he appeared happy to have the matter removed from his domain. “It’s a legal issue, not a health issue,” Lewin told the media upon receiving Price’s opinion. “It’s out of the department’s hands and into the legislature.” He returned to the Bay Area for law school and, revering the Warren Court and its success using the constitution as a driver of social change, joined a Marin County firm that specialized in civil-rights work.
Now it was Hawaii’s marriage code that presented Foley his most immediate obstacle. On April 12, 1991, each of the three couples received a formal notice that the health department would not recognize same-sex unions. The letter from state registrar Alvin T. Onaka cited chapter 572 ofthe same part of the code whose ambiguity about questions of gender emboldened Woods in the first place.
In November 1991, Judge Robert Klein rejected Foley’s claim, justifying the existing opposite-sex marriage stature as “clearly a rational, legislative effort to advance the general welfare of the community.
Now they would meet again in another courtroom, as two bearded 46-year-old children of the 1960s, both proud card-carrying members of the ACLU. When, in September, Foley began scribbling notes for an opening statement on a yellow legal pad, he had Levinson in mind as his audience. He knew that if he was unable to persuade Levinson, he would be unlikely to win over any other justice.
The implication was clear. This was a civil-rights case whose consequences for an aggrieved minority group went well beyond the clause in the Hawaii statute that identified the qualifications for marriage. Foley’s acknowledgment of weakness before federal courts was in fact its own solicitude to the vanities of the five men before him. No appeal of theirs could takeinto federal courts, and no judge would have to worry about the eventual indignity of seeing the Supreme Court reject his reasoning.