MI: Constitutional amendment decision--Rewarding dishonesty in Lansing

Link: Detroit Free Press
by Brian Dickerson

Excerpt:

Lansing lawyer Eric Doster is a busy fellow.

Besides serving as corporate counsel to the state Republican Party and running for a seat on the state Court of Appeals, he represented the coalition of religious activists who led the successful crusade to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan.

According to the state Supreme Court's Republican majority, Doster is also a bit of a fibber.

In an opinion released Wednesday, five GOP justices say the language of the constitutional amendment voters adopted in 2004 clearly prohibits public employers from providing medical benefits for same-sex couples, and that Doster was obviously stretching the truth when he told the State Board of Canvassers at an August 2004 hearing that it wouldn't.

In his 34-page opinion, Justice Stephen Markman acknowledges that Doster, in his capacity as counsel to Citizens for the Protection of Marriage, "apparently asserted that the amendment would not prohibit public employers from providing health insurance benefits to domestic partners."

Markman also concedes that brochures distributed by Doster's client -- the group that drafted the amendment to ban gay marriage and collected the signatures that put it on the November 2004 ballot -- said exactly the same thing.

Everybody does it

But Markman and his colleagues say voters who took those assertions at face value were, well, idiots.

"Supporters of legislative and constitutional initiatives often tend to downplay the effect of such initiatives," Markman blithely observed in his opinion. If voters wanted to know what the gay marriage ban would really do, he added, they could have read "newspapers such as the Detroit Free Press," where columnists (including yours truly) repeatedly predicted that the proposed amendment would be invoked to bar health insurance benefits for gay families.

I'm touched by Markman's public acknowledgement that what appears in this column is more trustworthy than a Republican lawyer's representations to a state tribunal. I've often thought that myself.

But the mere fact that Doster and people like me were disputing what the gay-marriage ban would do right up to the eve of the 2004 election undercuts Markman's assertion that the language of the amendment was clear on its face.

[...]

The majority simply said that the language of the proposed amendment was so clear, so utterly lacking in ambiguity, that any voter (much less any lawyer) who read it could readily understand that its adoption would bar employers like Michigan State University and the City of Kalamazoo from providing health benefits to their employees' domestic partners.

But if the language was that clear, why did so many voters question its practical impact? If it was obvious to any literate voter that the amendment would prohibit public employers from offering health benefits to domestic partners, why did those who bankrolled the amendment's passage repeatedly deny that it would?

I know from my own e-mail correspondence that some clergymen relied on those dishonest representations to rally support for the gay-marriage ban. Recognizing that the denial of medical benefits for certain of God's children might be viewed as less than Christian, they assured their congregations that a vote for the gay-marriage ban would accomplish nothing so draconian.

Now the state Supreme Courts says pastors who spread such disinformation should have consulted the language of the amendment (or the Free Press) rather than the propaganda disseminated by the amendment's sponsors and their paid mouthpiece.

Dishonesty, after all, is the coin of Michigan's political realm.

And now, thanks to Markman and his colleagues, it enjoys the protection of Michigan's highest court.

[jw]