Abstract
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all." 1 Introduction The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made legal history when it recently discovered that John Adams' Massachusetts Constitution, written in 1780, entitled same-sex couples to marry. Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to legally recognize such marriages. In the process, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the "case before us [was not] a "cause...of marriage...' within the meaning of the Massachusetts Constitution." 2 If the case was not about marriage, what was it about? Equal rights, apparently. That is why there was a rush to compare it to Brown v. Board of Education. 3 Thus, a judicial legend was hatched. Just as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 broke down the walls of racial segregation and opened up public schools to children previously denied access, so Goodridge v. Department of Public Health 4 opened up civil marriage to couples that had previously been denied the right to marry, precisely fifty years after the day of the Brown decision. Evan Wolfson, a leading advocate of same-sex marriage, stated: It is poetic and fitting...that May 17, 2004, the day the Goodridge decision required that state officials ...