Attorney argues for marriage rights for same-sex partners.

Evan Wolfson gave NCEW members a lesson in framing an argument.

Wolfson, a civil rights attorney and executive director of Freedom to Marry, asked editorial writers to support a nationwide "civil rights conversation" on marriage rights. And he urged us to ban the term "gay marriage" from the lexicon.

The issue, he said, is whether government has any justification for denying marriage to any two people who wish to marry.

American courts have fundamentally changed the institution of marriage over the years, removing restrictions on divorce, allowing married couples to obtain contraceptives, and striking down laws banning interracial marriages. It was not until 1984, Wolfson noted, that the marital rape exemption was removed from the law. Until that point, a husband could not be convicted of raping his wife because, under the law, he was taking what belonged to him.

"When we ended that legal subordination of women, we transformed marriage," Wolfson said, "from a union based on domination to one based on love, commitment, and the choice of two equal partners."

The next step, in Wolfson's view, is recognizing that government has no good reason to exclude same-sex couples from the evolving institution of marriage. When society ends that discrimination, he said, "families are helped, no one is hurt, marriage is preserved."

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race restrictions on marriage in 1967--nineteen years after the California Supreme Court had done so--seventy percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage, Wolfson said. "What kind of country would we have today if those courts had taken a poll?"

Then he pulled out all the rhetorical stops.

"Ask yourselves: What kind of country would we have today if the opponents of equality then, like the opponents of equality today, had run around the country mounting a campaign of stampeding through amendments to state constitutions and, if the president has his way, the federal Constitution, to lock into those precious charters of freedom the prejudices of the majority and the passions of the moment?"

Taking questions after his speech, Wolfson returned repeatedly to his central thesis that marriage is a civil rights issue. Civil unions are not enough, he said, and the often-voiced, slippery-slope argument that allowing gays to marry opens the door to polygamy or worse is a red herring.

Noting that nowhere in his remarks had he used the term "gay marriage" Wolfson said, "Vermont has created 'gay marriage' with its civil union statute--a second-class institution that confers some, but not all, of the benefits of legal marriage."

To the "why not call it something else" argument, Wolfson said, "either a civil union is the same as marriage, in which case we don't need two lines" at the county clerk's office, or it's not, and if not, what is the justification for denying some couples, but not others, the right to marry?

Convicted murderers, Wolfson pointed out, have a constitutional right to marry, recognized by the courts, but same-sex couples don't.

As for polygamy, Wolfson said, the same slippery-slope warnings were intoned by opponents of interracial marriage. In a free country, he said, advocates of polygamy have the same right to make their case in the courts as any other group. But government also is justified in imposing such regulations on marriage as a minimum age, restrictions on blood relatives, or prohibition of polygamy.

Government doesn't issue baptism licenses or communion licenses, Wolfson said, nor should it. It does issue marriage licenses.

That doesn't mean that churches are bound by what government allows. A church, synagogue, or mosque is free to refuse to marry anyone it chooses to exclude.

Government, however, must justify that refusal in court.

ONLINE: To listen to Evan Wolfson's speech, follow the convention links on the NCEW website.

Gary E. Nelson is editorial page editor of the Mail Tribune in Medford, Oregon. E-mail [e-mail]