In remarks made Feb. 26 from the campaign trail, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) unequivocally backed amending the Massachusetts Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, disappointing a number of the presumed Democratic presidential nominee’s gay supporters.

Ending speculation around previous statements that appeared to back such an amendment in theory, Kerry explicitly stated he would support the amendment if it also guaranteed same-sex couples access to civil unions, which he said convey all the legal rights of marriage. That claim is disputed by gay rights activists and runs contrary to a ruling last month by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

At the same, Kerry also reiterated his opposition to a similar ban proposed by President Bush for the U.S. Constitution, saying, “For 200 years [marriage] has been a state issue.”

Kerry waited weeks before nailing down his position, but gay lobby groups immediately issued statements of disappointment, calling into question their support for Kerry’s White House bid.

“While we acknowledge the senator’s strong opposition to a federal constitutional amendment, supporting a divisive measure in his own state is exceptionally disheartening,” said Cheryl Jacques, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a position she took after stepping down as a Massachusetts state senator. “Make no mistake, civil unions single out a group of people for second-class treatment.”

Other activists questioned whether there was hypocrisy in Kerry’s effort to defend “traditional marriage” in light of his own nuptial history. In a Washington Post interview last year, Kerry said, “I have a belief that marriage is for the purpose of procreation and it’s between men and women.”

“This is a familiar objection to gay marriage, and one that may sound reasoned and substantive, but it amounts to ridiculous sophistry,” wrote Michael Crowley, a New Republic columnist. “By Kerry’s procreation logic, why allow infertile heterosexuals to marry? What purposes could these marriages have?

“The question answers itself. Particularly for Kerry, whose marriage to Teresa Heinz has yet to produce a child — and, it seems safe to say, isn’t likely to produce one in the future.”

Kerry’s recent proclamations actually reversed a position he took two years ago, expressed in a letter he signed with his congressional colleagues beseeching the Massachusetts legislature to terminate the amendment. Grassroots organizers say Kerry is sacrificing his original views to reach out to moderate voters in the general election.

“This last month has shown us that leaders across the country — from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to Richard Daley in Chicago — can stand up for our rights without backlash,” said John Aravosis, co-founder of DontAmend.com, a Web site opposing a federal marriage amendment.

“Kerry may think that by taking this point of view, he is appealing to the mainstream. But by reinforcing it consistently, he is annoying gay people and causing straight people to regard him as a candidate who waffles on more universal issues,” Aravosis said.

Kerry’s marital history
The Kerry campaign maintains that, as a candidate for president, Kerry has a responsibility to separate his own personal experiences with marriage from the positions he believes will benefit the country as a whole.

“He must support policy which he believes is in the best interests of the public and uniting the public,” said Jeff Trammell, an adviser to the Kerry campaign on gay issues who played a similar role during Al Gore’s 2000 candidacy. “This is best achieved through civil unions.”

Trammell also said that Kerry has not wavered in his support for limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, while he built a career history of rejecting legislation that jeopardized the recognition of gay relationships.

“He, like everyone, is shaped by personal experience, but he showed great respect for LGBT people long before the mainstream,” Trammell said.

After meeting his first wife, Julia Throne, through his best friend and her twin brother, David, Kerry’s married life started out conventionally enough. Introduced in 1963 during a visit to the Thorne family’s Long Island estate, Thorne — heiress to a $300 million Wall Street fortune — remained with Kerry through his Yale years and his two tours in Vietnam. They married in 1970, according to the Boston Globe.

When he returned home, Kerry became active in politics, leading the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, followed by a run for the U.S. Congress in 1972 on an anti-war platform. The change in focus catapulted Thorne into the “teeming and often vicious world of politics,” she said in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid, and their marriage began to suffer.

After his failed Congressional run, Kerry enrolled in law school at Boston College — 35 miles away from their suburban Boston home — and immersed himself in his studies, often spending nights in the library despite the birth of his first daughter, Alexandra.

“I was alone and overwhelmed, abandoned with a new baby in a town that held political disdain for us,” Thorne said.

18-year marriage ‘annulled’
In 1976, Kerry became an assistant district attorney in Boston shortly before Thorne gave birth to their second daughter, Vanessa, though he eventually settled into a stable family life and a private law practice from 1979 to 1982.

But when Kerry re-entered the political world, it cost him his marriage to Thorne, who sunk into a deep depression she attributed to Kerry’s cold nature, fierce ambition and prolonged absences. On the eve of his election as lieutenant governor in 1982, Thorne separated from Kerry.

Political opportunity arose again after Paul Tsongas announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate in 1984. Kerry won the race to fill that seat and entered into what current wife Teresa Heinz called his “gypsy phase,” commuting between apartments in Washington, D.C., and Boston, and dating actresses Morgan Fairchild and Catherine Oxenberg as well as a former law partner.

Kerry and Thorne finalized their divorce in 1988. After Thorne requested an increase in alimony in 1995, Kerry sought an annulment of their marriage from the Catholic Church, a move observers saw as retaliatory.

Kerry eventually received the annulment from the Boston diocese despite Thorne’s vehement objections. Past media reports did not indicate the grounds on which Kerry sought to annul his marriage of 18 years, after it produced two children, and the campaign also declined to provide any explanation.

His political life may have ruined Kerry’s first marriage, but it eventually availed him a second opportunity for matrimony in 1990. On Earth Day, the late Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania introduced Kerry to his wife, Teresa, at a Capitol Hill environmental event.

Two years later, after John Heinz had died in a plane crash, Kerry again made Teresa Heinz’s acquaintance during an Earth Summit dinner in Rio de Janeiro. Following another serendipitous dinner in 1993 — this one honoring Chinese officials — Kerry invited Heinz to see the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial at night. The two began dating, and wed in 1995 at a Memorial Day ceremony on Nantucket.

“He was a person of the world in addition to being an American in the best sense. And I felt very comfortable with him,” Teresa Heinz Kerry told the Austin-American Statesman in January while on the New Hampshire primary campaign trail. “Plus, he was pretty charming, even if he was a little skittish in the beginning.”

Though the couple is known to engage in spirited public arguments, Washington insiders have proclaimed the Kerry-Heinz union a happy one. They acknowledge that melding the two families was difficult, but two of Heinz’s three sons campaign on behalf of their stepfather alongside Kerry’s daughters.

Many non-traditional families among Democratic contenders
With divorce, blended families and two-income households among them, the family lives of the 2004 field of Democratic candidates were said to have mirrored modern American households.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman has stepchildren and a child with second wife Hadassah; Howard Dean and wife Judith Steinberg practice different religions; and fertility treatments aided the ability of Sen. John Edwards’ wife to have a baby after she turned 50.

Kerry’s extended family also falls outside the traditional nuclear unit, and in the past he fought passionately against narrowly defining families.

“This is a power grab into states’ rights of monumental proportions,” Kerry said in 1996 during a 10-minute speech opposing an early version of the Defense of Marriage Act. “It is ironic that many of the arguments for this power grab are echoes of the discussion of interracial marriage a generation ago.”

Kerry was the only one of 14 senators who voted against DOMA who faced re-election that year. He went on to defeat GOP opponent William Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, who favors full-fledged gay marriage.

Some commentators have speculated that Kerry will use the gay marriage issue to prove his centrist credentials, much as Bill Clinton used his “Sister Souljah speech” in 1992.

Sister Souljah was a largely unknown African-American rapper singer whom Bill Clinton admonished for her anti-white lyrics at a 1992 campaign event organized by Rev. Jesse Jackson. Afterward, Jackson dissociated himself from the Clinton camp, and Clinton used the clash to prove his political independence with moderates.

However, some argue that a Sister Souljah move on gay marriage will backfire for Kerry, considering his own marital history.

“Kerry is a sophisticated, culturally liberal man who surely understands that marriage is about a great, great many things beyond procreation — companionship, financial stability, legal rights and social acceptance, for instance,” wrote Crowley, from the New Republic. “It may be true (although it’s not fully clear) that the country isn’t ready for gay marriage, and that a political blitz for marriage right now will only provoke an ugly backlash.

“But better that Kerry should make that case, which is what I suspect he believes, than parrot conservative ‘procreation’ dogma.”