Room I · The application
Fourteen people at the counter
Before it was a landmark, it was paperwork.
In the spring of 2001, seven couples from across Massachusetts went to their local clerks' offices and applied for marriage licenses. They were educators, engineers, lawyers, and health workers. Some had been together for decades. Some were raising children. Each application was denied for the same reason: both names on it belonged to people of the same sex.
In April 2001, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the Boston legal organization now known as GLAD, filed suit on their behalf against the state Department of Public Health, which administers marriage licensing. The case took its name from two of the plaintiffs, Hillary and Julie Goodridge. GLAD's civil rights director Mary Bonauto argued it.
The plaintiffs
- Hillary Goodridge & Julie Goodridge
- Gloria Bailey & Linda Davies
- Maureen Brodoff & Ellen Wade
- Gary Chalmers & Richard Linnell
- Michael Horgan & Edward Balmelli
- Heidi Norton & Gina Smith
- David Wilson & Robert Compton
Fourteen people, from five Massachusetts counties. They lost in Superior Court in 2002 and appealed. The Supreme Judicial Court, the oldest continuously sitting appellate court in the Western Hemisphere, took the case.
Room II · The opinion
November 18, 2003
Four justices to three, the court said the Commonwealth's constitution meant what it said.
Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall wrote the majority opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, and its opening pages contain the sentences this exhibit is built around.
From the opinion
“Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society.”
From the opinion
“The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens.”
Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 440 Mass. 309 (2003), Marshall, C.J., for the court. The vote was 4 to 3; three justices wrote in dissent.
The court did not order licenses issued that afternoon. It stayed its own judgment: “Entry of judgment shall be stayed for 180 days to permit the Legislature to take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of this opinion.” The clock started, and it would run out in the middle of May.
Room III · The stay
One hundred eighty days
Half a year sat between the ruling and the first license, and nobody knew which way it would break.
November 18, 2003
The decision comes down. Under the stay, no license can issue yet.
February 4, 2004
Asked by the state Senate whether civil unions, marriage in all but name, would satisfy the ruling, the justices answer no. The difference in wording, they write, “is not innocuous,” and assigns same-sex couples to what the opinion calls second-class status. Separate was not going to be equal in Massachusetts.
May 17, 2004
The 180 days run out. The law stands unchanged. The clerks' windows open.
Those months were loud: proposed constitutional amendments, national argument, predictions of every kind. This room keeps only the record. The Legislature took no action that changed the outcome, and the stay expired on schedule.
Room IV · The morning
May 17, 2004
Cambridge City Hall opened its doors just past midnight, and America's first legal same-sex marriages happened before lunch.
Cambridge chose not to wait for business hours. Shortly after midnight on May 17, its clerk's office began handing out applications while a crowd celebrated on the lawn. Among the first in line were Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey, together eighteen years. Later that morning, with a judge's waiver of the usual three-day wait, they were married at Cambridge City Hall by the city clerk, the first legally married same-sex couple in the United States.
It was not a Cambridge story alone. From that morning, every city and town clerk in the Commonwealth could issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, from Boston to the South Coast. The seven plaintiff couples married that day too, in their own cities and towns.
What the record shows
“yes”
The photographs of that morning, the lines, the confetti, the couples on the steps, belong to the news agencies that made them. What belongs to everyone is the word the Commonwealth finally said.
Room V · What it held
First in the nation
The door opened in Massachusetts stayed open, and eleven years later the country walked through it.
The first years carried an asterisk. A 1913 Massachusetts law barred out-of-state couples from marrying here if the marriage would be void at home, and in 2004 it was enforced to keep the new right inside the state line. The Supreme Judicial Court upheld that reading in 2006. On July 31, 2008, the Legislature repealed the 1913 law, and the asterisk came off.
The national story ran through three June 26ths, and this museum tells it in the next room: One Day in June follows Lawrence, Windsor, and Obergefell, the 2015 decision that made marriage equality the law of every state. When Obergefell was argued, the country had eleven years of Massachusetts marriages as evidence that the sky does not fall.
Massachusetts went first. The marriages performed that May morning are still standing.
Sources & honesty
What this exhibit rests on
The opinion quotations are from the published decision, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 440 Mass. 309 (2003), which is a public record; the advisory opinion on civil unions is Opinions of the Justices to the Senate, February 4, 2004. Case history is drawn from GLAD's case record. The account of May 17, 2004, including Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey's marriage, follows contemporaneous and retrospective reporting by NPR, WBUR, and The Boston Globe. The 1913 law's enforcement, 2006 court challenge, and July 31, 2008 repeal are matters of public legislative record. Where this exhibit says a thing plainly, at least two independent sources agree; full citations are held in the museum's research record.
One honest note: this exhibit names the plaintiffs because they put their names on a public lawsuit, and history should remember them. It does not follow their private lives afterward, because that part is theirs.
Museum