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[Tyrone Slothrop]

The Speaker of the Massachusetts House just stepped down to take a lobbying job, and his replacement is on the other side of the gay-marriage issue:

• The effort to bring a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to voters in November 2006 suffered a major setback yesterday with departure of House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran and the elevation of Salvatore F. DiMasi, whose arrival is expected to shift the Massachusetts legislative agenda to the left on social issues such as gay rights, abortion, and stem cell research.
  
  A key legislative backer of the proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage and establish civil unions yesterday all but declared defeat, saying that Finneran's exit from Beacon Hill was the final straw in an effort that already was in trouble because the state has legalized same-sex marriage with little of the uproar predicted by opponents.
  
  "It is pretty much over," said Senate minority leader Brian P. Lees, a Springfield Republican who cosponsored the amendment with Finneran and Senate President Robert E. Travaglini. The House and Senate, sitting in a constitutional convention, must vote a second time in the next session before it could go to the voters on the 2006 ballot.
  
  "In fact, there will be a question as to whether the issue will come up at all," Lees said. He said the issue has faded to the "back burners of Massachusetts politics," because few problems have surfaced with the implementation of the Supreme Judicial Court's decision to legalize gay marriage.
  
  "With the fact the law has been in effect for a number of months and with the change in the House leadership, it would appear any change in the constitution to ban marriage is quickly fading," Lees said.
  
  DiMasi supports same-sex marriage, and Finneran does not. In this year's constitutional convention, DiMasi opposed all versions of the proposed constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage and, in some cases, establish civil unions. He was among the few lawmakers who saw any amendment as a dilution of the SJC decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

Boston Globe