Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has
reiterated his support for gay marriage.
The Democrat first acknowledged his new
position in March, when his hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe,
asked him about the issue as part of a survey.
But in reporting the results, the paper
accidentally left Kerry's title and first name out of the story.
Earlier this month, the paper ran a
Kerry op-ed in which he defended President Barack Obama's right to
change his mind on gay marriage. In doing so, Kerry chronicled his
own journey to gay marriage proponent, but the piece didn't get much
attention.
“Everyone is entitled to his own
view, in his own time, including the president,” Kerry wrote.
“Seeing is believing. Many of us who
once believed civil unions were sufficient to protect legal rights
because we thought of marriage as a religious sacrament between a man
and a woman, have seen that no church has been forced to do anything
that contradicts its teaching. But when two committed people apply
for a Massachusetts marriage license, they are equal whether they are
gay or straight. It's not about a word – it's about equality under
the law.”
In
a new interview with the Globe, Kerry makes it clear that
he now supports full marriage for gay couples. The 67-year-old
senator had previously supported civil unions and state-level
constitutional amendments defining marriage as a heterosexual union,
but he was one of the few senators in 1996 to vote against the
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibits federal agencies from
recognizing the legal marriages of gay couples.
“I don't think it hurts the things I
thought it would; lesson learned,” Kerry said. “You evolve with
these things. You see through experience what happens. The sort of
concerns I had – that somehow it would have some impact on the
quality of church teaching, or that I wasn't honoring that – I
think is just not borne out by experience. Period.”