The law was enacted at the height of a public scandal over black heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson's interracial marriages.
[2] In 1912, prompted by the notoriety of Johnson's marriages, a Congressman from Georgia, Seaborn Roddenbery, proposed an anti-miscegenation amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"[11] Attorney General Tom Reilly ordered the clerks to follow the guidelines issued by the Department of Public Health.
[12] GLAD, an LGBT advocacy group, initiated a lawsuit on June 17, 2004, Cote-Whitacre v. Department of Public Health, on behalf of eight same-sex couples from other states—Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont—and by several Massachusetts city and town clerks who argued that they were being turned into "agents of selective enforcement."
[14] Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Carol Ball ruled on August 18 that the law was not unconstitutional, since it was applied equally to all couples without respect to sexual orientation.
[16] Justice Francis X. Spina, writing for the majority, said that "The laws of this commonwealth have not endowed nonresidents with an unfettered right to marry.
[18] In April 2004, as the dispute over using the law to prevent out-of-state same-sex couples from marrying was developing, a state representative filed a bill to repeal it.
[19] Two state senators, hoping to speed the legislative process, proposed adding a repeal amendment to the annual budget measure under consideration in May.
[26] The state's four Roman Catholic bishops asked the legislators not to change the law, as did the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI).
The statute's repeal made the state the second to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry regardless of their place of residence, as California had begun doing in June.
Mathew Staver, dean of the Liberty University School of Law, said: "The door has been opened to export same-sex marriage to other parts of the country.
A staff attorney at GLAD predicted few lawsuits and said: "States are going to have to sort this out over time, but there's nothing about same-sex couples that creates a new paradigm."
"[29] In October 2008, MassResistance, an organization opposed to gay and lesbian rights,[30] attempted to reinstate the law by referendum, but failed to collect sufficient signatures on petitions to qualify for the November 2010 ballot.
The Massachusetts Family Institute and the Catholic Church, both prominent opponents of same-sex marriage and the repeal of the 1913 law, did not support the petition drive.
In an email message to its supporters, MassResistance wrote that "Many people were afraid that if they signed, their names would end up on homosexual web sites and they would be harassed."
It also said that Catholic churches had been ordered not to allow signatures to be collected, that "priests spoke from the pulpit against it," and that the MFI was "afraid that if we forced a statewide election, it would be too difficult a fight and they wanted to avoid that.