On Gay Unions, D.C. Warily Holds Its Peace

In any list of places where gay activism has had a powerful impact, Washington holds a prominent, if not leading, spot. The nation's most important gay rights organizations are based here. Some of the pioneers of the gay liberation movement are Washingtonians. After Minneapolis, the District has the highest proportion of openly gay elected officials of any major city in the country.

And an analysis of census data by the Human Rights Campaign concluded that the District has a higher percentage of same-sex couples living together than any city except San Francisco.

Yet in all the furor over cities and counties approving gay marriage, the District has remained oddly out of the fray. Uncharacteristically silent. Deathly afraid.

It's all about Congress, of course. After all, this is the Last Colony.

There is no movement to let gays marry in Washington because if there were, it would easily pass the D.C. Council, on which eight of the 13 members support gay marriage, and it would handily win the mayor's signature, whereupon Congress would land on the District "immediately and ferociously," as council member Jim Graham, a Democrat who is gay, puts it.

The city's gay weekly, the Washington Blade, has urged a more aggressive approach, but the biggest gay activist groups in town counsel extreme caution.

"It's just the nature of living in the District," says Rick Rosendall, vice president for political affairs of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance. "The moment we move on the issue here, we'd get a draconian response from the Hill that will preclude us forever from accomplishing this. If self-rule meant anything, I would say let's do it tomorrow.

"But we don't live in an internally consistent world. We will talk about democracy in Baghdad, but we won't practice it consistently in the District of Columbia."

Council member David Catania, a Republican who is gay, says that on a personal level, "this is, for me, a simple issue. I'm going to respect the rights of two individuals to marry. But I am fearful of a congressional backlash. Some member of Congress is going to score a lot of brownie points on our backs."

Catania advises instead that the District adopt an incremental approach, slowly and methodically closing the dozens of gaps in D.C. law that grant rights to married people but not to domestic partners.

(The city Health Department has been issuing domestic partnership registration certificates since July 2002 -- a step that took a decade to get past threatened congressional vetoes. But only a few people have taken advantage of the program, in part because the certificates offer little in the way of expanded rights.)

Catania and Graham say the city's day of reckoning on the legal rights of gays is coming soon enough. Corporation Counsel Robert Spagnoletti, the city's lawyer, has written an opinion on whether the District must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

According to a government official who has reviewed its contents, the opinion says the District must indeed do so. But Mayor Tony Williams has not approved the opinion and so it will not be released for "a couple of weeks," said Corporation Counsel spokesman Tarifah Coaxum.

"At that point, the issue will be out there," Graham says. "I understand the point of view that we have to be cautious, but this is about the power of love. These people standing in the rain all night long to profess their love for another human being -- that can no longer be contained. People are going to go from D.C., get married, come back and demand to know, 'Hey, is my marriage legally valid?' "

Even if the District avoids provoking Congress and does not give gay marriage the green light here, a simple legal opinion might well give congressional conservatives the opening they seek to act.

"Remember," Rosendall says, "doing something to us would only take a majority vote, rather than the two-thirds they need for a constitutional amendment."

So gay activist groups remain silent in Washington. At freedomtomarry.org, the Web site for one of the most active proponents of gay marriage, the page for the District reads only, "Check back later. . . . "