Wave Maker

Wow, that headline looks weird to me.

It's a good thing Sam Allis's opinions are printed on page two of the Sunday Globe. I usually can't make it much past that. But in this case, he's written a sturdy piece on the legislature's trashing of our constitutional right to have a vote on the gay marriage amendment. Not that it requires a spectacular feat, but his logic is spot on:

Process liberals get tagged in torrid single-issue causes whose advocates like Isaacson conclude that the end justifies the means. That the goal is so important, they can ignore due process, in this case the state constitution.

"It's not a matter of following the constitution," says John Reinstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. "It's following the constitution down the drain."

Great line, but, of course, once you start choosing which parts of the constitution to obey, you're practicing cafeteria constitutionalism, which invites cynicism.

Say for the sake of argument that the ballot initiative would embed in the constitution the right of gays to marry and that the Legislature dodged a vote on it. Isaacson and Reinstein would, in righteous dudgeon, demand that legislators honor their oath of office to obey the state constitution.

They would demand that a Constitutional Convention follow Article 48 of the document, whose clear intent calls for a vote on an initiative before it. (If there are 50 votes in favor, the proposal goes on the ballot in the next statewide election.) The irony is that Article 48 was added to the constitution in 1918 to provide citizens a means to thwart an obstructionist legislature.
There was nothing pretty about the 109-to-87 vote to skate on the gay marriage initiative, which drew a record 170,000 signatures. No profiles in courage either. The leaders of both houses took a powder instead of defending the craven recess vote.

Way to go Sam.