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.
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.
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.
An annulment by any other name:
Legal annulment vs. Catholic annulment vs. divorce
In Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is up for debate
and where presidential candidate John Kerry obtained both
a divorce and annulment from the Roman Catholic Church, three
invalidations of heterosexual relationships are sanctioned
by church and state.
The most common method of ending a marriage
is divorce, and in the Bay State couples must prove one
of six faults: adultery, impotency, desertion, drug abuse,
physical or mental abuse, or “refusal to provide
suitable maintenance,” according to state law.
A family court oversees the equitable
distribution of property, as well as alimony, child support
and child visitation.
Massachusetts will grant a divorce only if either party is
a bona fide resident at the time the marriage occurred within
the state; otherwise, it requires a one-year delay.
A civil annulment differs greatly in
that a divorce ends a valid marriage while in an annulment,
a court declares a marriage void — as if it never
took place.
The grounds for an annulment are a bit
more rigid, and the court will grant one only if — at
the time of the marriage — one party to the marriage
was underage, under the influence of alcohol or drugs,
impotent, mentally incompetent, forced to marry or committed
fraud (nondisclosure of a prior divorce or pregnancy),
according to Charles Kindregan Jr., a professor of family
law at Suffolk University.
“ Fraud means that concealment
goes to the essence of the marriage relationship; mere
misrepresentations of character are not grounds,” Kindregan
said.
The law also requires the party seeking
the annulment to immediately cease living with the other
party upon discovery of the impropriety. Civil annulments
are rare in Massachusetts, mostly because “divorce
includes a support element and it is the preferable remedy,” Kindregan
said.
Finally, in the eyes of the Catholic
Church, a marriage is a sacrament, and a sacrament cannot
be set aside by human power. Therefore, if either one of
the parties in a divorce ever wants to be married by a
priest, he or she must request a religious annulment from
a diocesan tribunal, a church court headed by the local
bishop.
Catholic couples must establish very
well defined canonical justifications — more spiritual
in nature, than secular explanations — before an
annulment proceeds, according to Rev. John Byrnes, an expert
in canonical law.
A spouse can attain an annulment under
the fraud canon if he or she was intentionally deceived
about the presence or absence of a quality in the other.
Or tribunals will grant annulments simply under canons
that say one or the other spouse married intending, explicitly
or implicitly, to deny sexual acts of procreation, fidelity
or marital permanence.
While Catholic annulments don’t
require attorneys, and thus, attorney’s fees, each
party requires an advocate to present the cases. An annulment
will usually set the petitioner back $400-500 for the tribunal’s
study.
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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.
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.”