Patrick Unblocks Recording of 26 Gay Marriages

In his run for President, Governor Mitt Romney found marriage equality a compelling issue. That was after promising to support gay rights in his senatorial run against Senator Edward Kennedy. One of his political moves was to block the recording of 26 gay marriages. He now stands corrected.

Governor Deval Patrick has ordered the state Department of Public Health to officially record the marriages of 26 out-of-state gay couples whose unions Governor Mitt Romney had blocked from being entered into the state's vital records.

Patrick's move emphasizes his administration's sharp differences with his predecessor on gay marriage. The issue is largely symbolic; neither Romney's refusal to record the marriages nor Patrick's reversal of that order affects the legal status of the marriages. But an aide said Patrick wanted to reverse an action taken by Romney that the new administration sees as discriminatory.

"There was no legal basis for separating these certificates in the first place," said Kyle Sullivan, a spokesman for Patrick. "It appears like the prior administration was politicizing a routine administrative function."

Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman for Romney, now a presidential candidate, responded that Romney was correct to refuse to record the marriages because Massachusetts law does not recognize marriage between same-sex couples from outside the state.

"It was Governor Romney's enforcement of this law that stopped gay marriage from being visited on every other state in the country," Fehrnstrom wrote in an e-mail. "Now that Governor Romney is out of office, we are seeing an erosion of the previously strong defense of traditional marriage coming out of the executive branch."

In March 2006, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Romney and Thomas F. Reilly, the state attorney general at the time, could rely on a 1913 law to prohibit out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts. The court ruled that if a couple's home state expressly prohibits same-sex marriages, that couple would not be eligible to marry here.

Gay couples from Rhode Island are the only out-of-state gay couples who are currently allowed to wed in Massachusetts; a judge in September 2006 ruled that Rhode Island laws do not explicitly prohibit gay marriages. Two of the 26 couples whose records were not processed by Romney were from Rhode Island, according to the governor's office.

--Mb