HAWAIIAN COURTSHIP

Six years ago next week, three couples, all longtime residents of Hawaii, decided to challenge that state's proscription of same-sex marriage by applying for marriage licenses in Honolulu. It was not a decision they entered into lightly. Joe Melillo and Patrick Lagon had been a couple for 13 years; Antoinette Pregil and Tammy Rodrigues--who raised Antoinette's daughter together--for nine; and Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel for 18 months. The health department refused to issue the licenses on the ground that only a man can marry a woman, and only a woman can marry a man.

The couples went to court, claiming sex discrimination. In 1993 the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting one individual from marrying another on account of his or her gender would violate the Hawaii state constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the laws, unless the government could prove that the state had some compelling, legitimate reason to ban same-sex marriage.

The case was sent back to Hawaii's First Circuit Court, and last week, after extensive testimony from psychologists and sociologists, Judge Kevin S.C. Chang found the state had failed to prove that same-sex marriages would harm children or anybody else. The state immediately appealed the ruling back to the Hawaii Supreme Court. But given its earlier reasoning, that panel is likely to uphold Judge Chang--and there is no further appeal, because the decision is based on the state constitution. By 1998 gay couples may be free to marry in Hawaii.

But what does last week's ruling mean for the other states? Conservatives fear that it will usher in an era of "moral anarchy," in the words of Robert Knight, director of cultural studies for the Family Research Council in Washington. "It will lead to calls for other relationships to be recognized, because if feelings are the key to recognizing a marriage, there's no logical reason why three or four people who say 'We sincerely love each other' should be denied this status," he explains. Gay-rights groups also expect wide repercussions, though of a very different kind. "This decision was an extraordinary turning point," declares Evan Wolfson, an attorney at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund who served as co-counsel for the three couples, "because we now have in the cool, clear light of a courtroom a judge saying that there is no reason for government discrimination in marriage."

According to legal experts, however, the right of gay couples to marry in Hawaii won't have a broad impact on the mainland for some time to come. The state supreme court's decision has no binding effect as a precedent in other states, though gays elsewhere could invoke the persuasiveness of its reasoning. Other states remain free to set gender-based restrictions on marriage because the U.S. Supreme Court has never decided whether the Federal Constitution bans such restrictions. (The high courts of several states have ruled that it does not.)