WASHINGTON, March 23 (UPI) -- The ongoing spate of gay marriages in San Francisco isn't sitting well with openly gay Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who calls it a "well-intentioned mistake."
Frank supports gay marriages, just not the ones in San Francisco, he told the Washington Post Tuesday.
He says they were not legal marriages but rather acts of civil disobedience -- a mass "spectacle" that only increased support for President Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to limit marriage to unions between men and women.
He told the newspaper the couples should have done it the legal way and waited for Massachusetts to start issuing licenses to gay couples in May.
Even before he was publicly out, Frank's political career tracked the history of the gay rights movement. In 1973, his first year as a state representative, he introduced Massachusetts's first two gay rights bills, to repeal the sodomy laws and outlaw discrimination against gays.
In 1987 he came out publicly in an interview with the Boston Globe.
