Like thousands of others, I will forever remember Thursday, February 12, 2004. The Assembly had held its regularly scheduled floor session that morning. Immediately afterwards I went to then-Speaker Fabian Nunez's office to discuss with him my plans to introduce the nation's very first marriage equality bill.
Although the speaker was fully in support of our effort, he questioned me about the wisdom of moving such a bill forward at that time. It had been just months since Governor Gray Davis had signed into law the very controversial AB 205, which extended nearly all of the rights, benefits, privileges, obligations and responsibilities of marriage to registered domestic partners. It was a presidential election year and Republicans had already demonstrated their intent to use marriage equality as a politically charged wedge issue. There was even uncertainty within our small LGBT Legislative Caucus as to whether it was an appropriate time to move the bill forward since there was no certainty that we had sufficient votes to pass it. In fact, Speaker Nunez shared with me that he was hearing from a number of Democratic colleagues urging him to stop me as they were afraid of political fallout in their re-elections that November if they voted for it while simultaneously not wanting to vote against it.
I thanked the speaker for his counsel and concern but told him that my mind was made up and that the bill would be introduced that morning. Immediately after doing so, I headed to San Francisco knowing that Mayor Gavin Newsom was about to break the state law, which our bill, AB 1967, would attempt to change. The first few couples, including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, had already taken their vows by the time I arrived. For the next five hours, then-Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng and I stood under the dome of City Hall in its magnificent rotunda officiating the weddings of nearly one hundred couples who had traveled across town for the privilege of exercising their fundamental right of citizenship �" to marry the person he or she loved. As the holiday weekend and Valentine's Day quickly approached, couples were now traveling cross country and across oceans to race to San Francisco to participate in that which is now known as the "Winter of Love."
Anyone who was there that first weekend and the month which followed will clearly remember the elation, joy, ecstasy, and profundity of loving couples, previously denied their very humanity, being allowed to say the simple words "I do."
We will always be appreciative of Newsom's leadership and vision in recognizing the civil rights issue of our day and acting upon his conviction that our Constitution requires that everyone be treated equally under the law. It is a simple concept that we in the queer community have been fighting for over the past 40 years. It took the mayor's bold action, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera's defense of it, to let the nation see the love and commitment shared by same-sex couples. This country's debate about equal marriage rights had begun and there would be no going back.
My personal journey to the commitment of changing the state's discriminatory law was heavily influenced by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's November 2003 decision. In it, the justices ruled that there is no constitutional basis for denying same-sex couples marriage licenses. They went on to say that our nation's history has taught us that separate is seldom if ever equal. But they also said something I had never thought about before and will never forget. The court said that the only remedy to this identified discrimination is marriage and marriage alone. No parallel construct such as civil unions or domestic partnerships would do, they said, because it would perpetuate a destructive stereotype that suggests that there is something inferior and unstable about the way same-sex couples love.
Our ability to love and our desire to love someone in an intimate and committed fashion is our common humanity, the thing that makes us human beings. The idea that our public policy and law-making would allow government to determine that some of us love better than others, seemed to me offensive and untenable. It was at that time that I decided, with the support of my staff, Geoff Kors, then at Equality California, and Kate Kendall and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, to fight a war over a word.
Ten years later, with so many court decisions, ballot box battles, and legislative debates behind us, the public is now firmly with us. A recent Field poll reveals that Californians now support marriage equality by a ratio of 2 to 1. As Abraham Lincoln reminds us, "With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed."
State Senator Mark Leno (D) represents the 11th Senate District, which includes all of San Francisco and a portion of northern San Mateo County.