Massachusetts brought the gay-marriage debate back into the national spotlight last November, but it’s not among the eleven states with a defense-of-marriage amendment on the ballot this election cycle. It will be at least two more years before any Bay-Stater without a seat on the supreme judicial court gets to vote on the issue.
Yet gay marriage figures prominently in the commonwealth’s only seriously contested congressional race. In the Third District, Democratic congressman Jim McGovern’s GOP challenger is Ron Crews, the former president of the socially conservative Massachusetts Family Institute and a leading public advocate for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and woman.
Crews isn’t interested in being seen as a single-issue candidate. Before getting to the thorny marriage issue, he rattles off a series of talking points on tax cuts, the economy, border security, and national defense. He mentions his military career–he continues to serve as the senior chaplain in the Massachusetts Army National Guard–and his service in the Georgia state legislature, where he chaired the Republican Welfare Reform Task Force and was ranking minority member of the Defense and Veterans Affairs Committee. “When people talk to me and look at my record, they clearly see that this is not a single-issue campaign,” Crews says.
Be that as it may, the Ashland resident has lived in Massachusetts for just four years. His high public profile–some would say notoriety–stems from his role in the post-Goodridge debate over same-sex marriage on Beacon Hill. His showing Tuesday will be seen, rightly or wrongly, as an indicator of the issue’s electoral potency.
How well can he do? McGovern has compiled a voting record second only to Barney Frank’s in its reliable liberalism. He has consistently opposed tax cuts, rejected legislation forbidding U.N. supervision of U.S. elections, and voted against the partial-birth abortion ban. He also has a 100 percent rating from Crews’s nemesis, the Human Rights Campaign. Some voters may find his interest in Latin America and Cuba exotic, but he can point out that these were also priorities of his mentor, the late longtime South Boston Congressman Joe Moakley. McGovern is probably to the left of his district, but his campaign is well positioned to make the case that Crews is to its right.
Crews, after all, is an evangelical pastor who moved to Massachusetts from Georgia to run a pro-family public-policy outfit. While Roman Catholics have often been a powerful socially conservative influence, the state doesn’t have much of a Christian Right as such and evangelicals don’t cut a large political presence. If McGovern wanted an opponent he could easily caricature as excessively right-wing and out-of-step with the Third Congressional District, Crews is that opponent.
“I don’t hear so much about being a Georgia transplant anymore,” says Crews. “That isn’t how my campaign is being described in the local press.”
While Massachusetts doesn’t have any Republican congressional districts, the Third is probably the least overwhelmingly Democratic. Mitt Romney carried it with 53 percent of the vote in 2002; William Weld and Paul Cellucci ran strongly there before him. Many of the GOP state senators and nearly a third of the small band of Republican state house members represent cities and towns located in the district. Republican Peter Blute held the house seat for two terms in the 1990s, losing only after the AFL-CIO and other liberal interests targeted him in 1996–after a campaign in which McGovern ran ads tying Blute to another conservative Georgian, Newt Gingrich. McGovern’s last Republican challenger managed to break 40 percent in 1998, a bad year for the Bay State GOP.
Polls show that most area voters oppose same-sex marriage. The district has also traditionally had pro-life representation, not only with Blute but for nearly 20 years with Democrat Joe Early.
Crews’s fundraising has lagged behind the incumbent’s, but he has been able to advertise on the radio. Pro-family groups have been distributing voters’ guides to some area churches. McGovern remains the heavy favorite. Whatever the national outcome, John Kerry is sure to defeat George W. Bush in Massachusetts by a wide margin. The well-oiled state Democratic machine will be out in full force. It is not clear how Crews’s consistent support for Bush’s policies in Iraq will play in the district.
While Crews is an unorthodox candidate for the region, many Massachusetts pols are likely to be interested in his showing. If a preacher turned politician runs unexpectedly well on the marriage issue, more than a few old Beacon Hill hands will take notice.
–W. James Antle III is an assistant editor at The American Conservative and a longtime resident of Massachusetts’s Third Congressional District.