Massachusetts a state divided over same-sex marriage

It's an issue that isn't cut-and-dried for many people, as the state's religious heritage collides with its progressive leanings.

BOSTON - When her seven children were growing up, Nat Cuoco often reminded them that their grandfather, at age 11, was sold into bondage during a famine in southern Italy. He was the only thing of value his parents had left to sell.

He eventually immigrated as a free man to Boston, where he found work shoveling coal in a power plant, then rose to plant engineer. On winter nights, he would gather his children around the furnace in the basement and tell them about it.

His life gave Mrs. Cuoco a deep appreciation for personal freedom and self-determination. She thought about him when she heard the news about gay marriage, then decided she could support it.

"I would not call it liberalism," said Mrs. Cuoco, 81, a lifelong Bostonian and devout Roman Catholic who winters in Lakeland. She returned to Massachusetts this week to spend the holidays with her children. "It's a strong feeling you inherit from birth - you have all you can do to take care of yourself, to take care of your family, to take care of your town.

"You don't need people to tell you how to live, where to live or with whom to live."

In the week after the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled the state consitution gives gays the right to marry, the Bay State is struggling to square its strong Catholic sentiment and Puritan roots with a culture that values self-reliance and social progress.

As gay-rights groups crow, the Archdiocese of Boston scolds and national conservative groups send operatives to Boston to marshal opposition, extensive interviews and polls suggest most residents are neither wildly for, nor wildly against, the court's decision.

Instead, the notion of gay marriage is testing the limits of many who generally favor equal rights for gays. It also is finding supporters among residents whose respect for the inalienable individual rights championed by their forefathers won't let them oppose it.

"What other people do with their own lives, is that up to me?" June Lesch, 88, asked as she sat by the window of her shake-shingled home on Bear Skin Neck, up in Rockport. Her late husband was the town pewtersmith and harbor master, and she has lived on the second floor of this former fish house for 58 years.

Many institutions have changed in that time, and she's okay with this one. "Let them live the way they want to live."

The supreme court's 4-3 decision gave the Legislature six months to craft a law providing for same-sex marriage, which would make Massachusetts the first state to recognize it. Neighboring Vermont allows gays to enter into a "civil union" that confers marriagelike financial and legal benefits, but it isn't recognized federally or by other states.

Only Massachusetts would put the union of gays legally on par with holy matrimony. That is difficult for many people to embrace.

"Marriage?" Jay O'Connor said after he delivered two beers to a lesbian couple seated at the corner of his bar in Cambridge. He shook his head. "I don't know."

O'Connor, 41, is a beefy Irish Catholic and lifelong Democrat who grew up in the blue-collar enclave of Charlestown, across the Charles River from Boston. At night he pours Guinness stout at a popular pub off Harvard Square, and by day he works construction.

He is unmarried and unsettled by the high divorce rate and he worries gay marriage will only strain an already embattled institution. Plus, the Catholic church is fiercely against it.

"Marriage is sacred, supposedly," O'Connor said. "It doesn't bother me what they're doing, but marriage is an institution, and the main reason is to have children."

Catholicism here is like the sun in Florida: shining for some, scorching for others and impossible to escape. The Archdiocese of Boston, which claims more than 2-million members, boasts one of the most powerful lobbies on Beacon Hill, and it has warned Democratic legislators they will suffer politically if they sanction gay marriage.

The arguments by activists on both sides of the debate are simple: The church and others against gay marriage say it is unnatural, immoral and antibiblical and it will cheapen marriage between man and woman.

Supporters, including a large contingent of ministers from major Protestant denominations, say letting gays marry is only fair, and they equate bans on gay marriage with bans on interracial marriage that persisted through the 1960s.

But on the street, the feelings of many residents are more complex.

Despite his Catholic faith, Frank Russell, a lawyer and school board member in the suburb of Malden, says it's fair to give gay couples marriagelike benefits, such as rights of survivorship, the ability to share health insurance and the power to make medical decisions for their partners.

But marriage goes too far. "This sort of pushes the envelope in terms of how tolerant people are going to be. ... It's difficult for me to understand how you could call that sort of relationship a marriage."

A poll last Sunday by the Boston Globe found 50 percent of Massachusetts residents agreed with the court's decision. But 53 percent opposed a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would ban same-sex marriage.

Fourteen years ago, Massachusetts became one of the first states to ban discrimination in housing, hiring and other matters on the basis of sexual orientation. For the past decade, gay couples could get symbolic "domestic partnership" certificates in Cambridge, where the 18th century moralism symbolized by the towering church spires has been mellowed by the liberalism of academia.

But just as there are dissenters in Cambridge, tolerance for gay marriage extends well beyond Boston's subway system and its thriving gay community. On the gritty waterfront in Gloucester, where sea gulls kite over steel-hulled trawlers held together by paint and rust, scalloper Steve Gianakakis and a buddy tried to explain their conflicting feelings.

Even as they peppered their discussion with antigay slurs and made clear they were not advocates of gay rights, the men said they wouldn't deny gays any rights, either.

They've met plenty of them fishing out of Provincetown, a heavily gay community on Cape Cod, as well as in Key West and Madeira Beach. If marriage is important to them, they should be allowed to marry, they said.

"What does it matter? To each his own, long as they don't f------ interrupt your life," said Gianakakis, 53, the son of a clam digger from nearby Ipswich. "You're only bothered if you want to be."

Several wharves away, lobsterman Vito Demetri unloaded his catch from the Sandra D and said the nation has bigger worries than stopping one man from marrying another. Jobs are scarce, lobsters are getting scarcer and his son-in-law is fighting in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division.

His elderly Catholic mother, who lives two doors down from him, was appalled with the ruling on gay marriage, but he didn't mind it. Gloucester is a clannish town where personal relations often outweigh the political, and Demetri, 45, said several childhood friends are gay.

"They weren't gay then. They just got gay when they got older, I guess," he said. "I didn't turn my back on them. They're still my friends. What they do in their private lives, it's fine with me."

Downtown Boston was cold and dark when the Metropolitan Community Church launched into its opening hymn, Come, Ye Thankful People, at last Sunday's 6 p.m. service. The MCC, which ministers to the gay community, meets Sundays in Old West Church, a 197-year-old Methodist church at the foot of Beacon Hill.

Inside it was warm and bright, and a rainbow flag hung over the altar. The guest pastor, the Rev. Marie A. Bacchiocchi, preached the importance of being thankful for God's blessings, even if your blessings aren't complete. She had people on both sides of the gay marriage debate in mind.

"God's miracle comes shining through," she told the audience, who numbered just 15. "Sometimes it is as large as a supreme court ruling. Sometimes it is as small as an understanding heart, (open) to hearing a different perspective."

Bacchiocchi, 37, is a minister in the United Church of Christ, Congregational, the state's largest Protestant denomination. The Congregationalists are the descendents of the Puritans who landed at Plymouth almost 400 years ago.

Despite their stark, angular sanctuaries with hard white pews and a centuries-old reputation for starchy morality, the church in Massachusetts generally supports gay marriage. Members note the church has a long history of agitating for social change.

Its men helped lead the American Revolution, and the Congregational church pushed for the abolition of slavery decades before the Civil War. The church began ordaining gay and lesbian ministers in 1971, although they aren't accepted in every congregation.

Bacchiocchi grew up Catholic near Plymouth and was 16 when she felt called to the ministry, well before she knew she was a lesbian. Later, she would keep her sexuality to herself as she earned a master's of divinity at Harvard University and won her first job, as an associate pastor at a Congregational church in Minnesota.

She was fired when she revealed she was gay. After a seven-year hiatus from the pulpit, during which she earned another master's degree, taught at a Christian school and served as a hospice chaplain, Bacchiocchi became the associate pastor and youth coordinator at the First Church in Malden, Congregational, UCC. Congregants knew she was gay when the church hired her in 2002.

The church dates to 1648, but burned down 70 years ago. The congregation rebuilt for eternity, with a steel frame and massive brick fire walls. "The whole notion that it will be hit by lightning and burn to the ground is not going to happen," Bacchiocchi said.

Under the supreme court's ruling, the Legislature must provide for gay marriage by May. Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, a Mormon and social conservative, has suggested a civil union might satisfy the court, and gay rights advocates vow to challenge anything short of full marriage.

In the meantime, Romney is backing an amendment to the state constitution that would ban same-sex marriage.

But that process is cumbersome, and the amendment could not reach voters before 2006. By then, hundreds of gay and lesbian couples from Massachusetts and beyond are expected to have married here, including Bacchiocchi.

She and her partner, Sandy Clockadile, a librarian she has known since their college days at Mount Holyoke, plan to wed in June, after the spring rains stop and the Legislature acts.

They plan to hold the service "before God and our friends and family," at her 355-year-old church in Malden, on the village square. They've begun choosing their processional music, their Scripture readings and their flowers. Their colors are turquoise and purple.

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