November 2007

Bar News welcomes letters from readers. We do not run letters that have been printed in, or are pending before, other legal publications with overlapping readership. Letters must be 250 words in length or less, and e-mailed to letterstotheeditor@wsba.org or mailed to WSBA, Attn: Letters to the Editor, 1325 Fourth Ave., Ste. 600, Seattle, WA 98101-2539. Bar News reserves the right to edit letters. Bar News does not print anonymous letters, or more than one submission per month from the same contributor.

Equal marriage, unequal views

As one of the lawyers who argued in defense of our existing marriage laws in Anderson v. King County et al, I was stunned to flip through the September Washington State Bar News, almost completely devoted to “marriage equality,” and not find a single opposition article authored by a lawyer from the defendants’ side. Instead, it chose Mr. Klaus Snyder to write the lone opposition piece and he focused on an historical, cultural argument for marriage that I have never seen used in defense of the marriage limitation, nor relied upon by a single appellate court, though I have read thousands of pages of case law, law review articles and anything else I could get my hands on to prepare the briefs and for oral argument before the State Supreme Court. This failure to contact lawyers most familiar with the arguments in support of the marriage limitation, while soliciting articles from lawyers who represented the plaintiffs’ interests in this seminal case (Hugh Spitzer and Patricia Novotny), suggest the Bar News was not really trying to “educate, debate, inform, advise, and stimulate” readers’ thoughts as WSBA Executive Director Paula Littlewood claims on page 13. Good journalism and lively debate were casualties of the Bar News’ effort to centerpiece a single viewpoint.

Is the Bar News so afraid of the actual arguments in support of the marriage limitation that it failed to make sure those arguments would be considered by its readership?

Steven O’Ban, Seattle

Emotionally charged and unbalanced

It was interesting that in the September publication you printed one article mentioning the potential drawbacks to gay marriage in the face of three that support gay marriage.

In addition to this obvious inequality of articles on one side of this issue you also managed to fail to screen the articles in support of gay marriage. The writings were emotionally intense. In “Equal Marriage in My Lifetime? Whoa!” the author feels his experience taking the bar exam was somehow different because of self doubt due to his orientation. This is indeed unfortunate. However, one should ask what does that have to do with marriage laws.

In “Marriage Equality: Why Gay and Lesbian Couples Shouldn’t Be Excluded,” the author argues that marriage is a fluid concept and states: “In western tradition, romantic love between spouses was anomalous until relatively recently.” There is no support for this statement. Is this somehow a reference to sexual love as a part of romantic love? If so there are Puritan writings on ways to assure both husband and wife maintain sexual pleasure in marriage.

I have spoken to several other lawyers and it seems that one reason for the imbalance on this issue is fear of RPC Rule 8.4 g. This rule should be clarified to encourage open debate where there are true scientific and sociological issues. Other lawyers who saw the imbalance in coverage were afraid to write for fear of an ethics debate centered on them.

William Murphy, Spokane