Signs of support flourished at the State House rally on Saturday.
Gay activist skewers legislators for inaction on equality issues
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 7, 2009
By Gina Macris
Providence Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — A longtime gay-rights activist excoriated the Democratic leadership of the General Assembly on Saturday for refusing to let party members vote their conscience on same-sex marriage.

But Ken Fish saved his harshest words for House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox, an openly gay man.

Just days after New Hampshire became the sixth state to legalize gay marriage, Fish urged about 300 people at a State House rally Saturday to crank up the pressure on the legislative leadership, whom he called “homophobic and cowardly.”

States are strengthened when all citizens share equally in legal rights and responsibilities, Fish said, and support for same-sex marriage is gaining in the General Assembly.

A recent Brown University poll said 60 percent of Rhode Islanders favor same-sex marriage.

But House Speaker William J. Murphy refuses to allow a House Judiciary Committee vote that would get the issue to the House floor, according to Fish.

Murphy “refuses to let party members vote their conscience,” Fish said.

State Rep. Frank Ferri, D-Warwick, a chief backer of the same-sex marriage bill, said 36 House members have signed on as co-sponsors, including 10 of the 15 members of the House Judiciary Committee, where the bill has been “held for further study.”

Fish, a retired state education official who has been active in the gay community since the 1970s, spelled out his disappointment in Fox. He said he spoke only on his own behalf.

“Many of us were proud when Gordon Fox became Democratic majority leader,” he said.

“Many of us were proud when Gordon Fox came out,” said Fish.

“But Gordon Fox is part of the problem,” he said.

“When Gordon Fox goes along to get along, he drags us with him,” Fish said.

During the last two years, the tight control of the House leadership on the committee process also has sparked outrage among environmentalists, who finally saw House passage Thursday of a bill to increase maximum daily fines against corporate polluters from $1,000 to $25,000 a day.

At the rally Saturday, meanwhile, Fish castigated what he said was the undue negative influence of the Catholic Church on key legislators.

Civil marriage of same-sex couples “does nothing to change the Catholic Church” but would merely enable other denominations, already willing, to marry them legally, Fish said.

One by one, he called on Bishop Thomas J. Tobin, House Speaker Murphy and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Donald J. Lally Jr. to “let his people go.”

“It’s time to send a message to the cowardly and homophobic political leaders in Rhode Island,” Fish said.

To one side of the State House lawn stood about a half-dozen opponents of same-sex marriage, each wearing a sticker that said “Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman.”

Christopher Plante, spokesman for the National Organization for Marriage, said that same-sex marriage is a social experiment that goes against the man-woman arrangement that has proven “the ideal situation for raising children.”

But Elise Jakobhazy, of Providence, walked up to Plante to voice her objections. She and her female partner are the adoptive parents of a boy who was abandoned by a heterosexual couple, she said.

“We all deserve equal rights and happiness and the right to end it if it doesn’t work,” Jakobhazy said.