ABSTRACT
The same-sex marriage debate exploded on the national scene in the early 1990s, despite the fact that lesbians and gay men had been challenging their exclusion from the rights of marriage since the early 1970s. The AIDS crisis that emerged in the 1980s also inspired a call for full legal recognition of gay marriage by some movement activists. The reality of AIDS "suddenly forced tens of thousands of committed gay couples to deal with powerful institutions—hospitals, funeral homes, state agencies—that did not recognize their commitments. From 1993 to 2003, forty-eight of the fifty states "introduced laws that limited legal recognition of marriage to opposite-sex couples". The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriage in that state and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom began the process of granting marriage licenses to lesbian and gay couples. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision provided more support for conservatives, who believed that the Republican Party should use same-sex marriage as a wedge issue.
