E-Mail This Article to a Friend Doing the right thing Three cheers for Maura Hennigan. Plus, Mitt Romney is coming unhinged.

IT’S EASY TO take at-large city councilor Maura Hennigan for granted. She’s been in office since 1981. She’s a crusader. And an easily parodied one at that. Her latest mission — well chronicled in the city’s two dailies — is to rid Boston of potholes. Her obsession with the issue began last year, when she broke her ankle by falling into a pothole while participating in the Haitian-American Unity Day parade. Since then, Hennigan has called City Council hearings to investigate the issue of unfilled potholes — the latest of which took place this past Monday — and created a Web site (www.boston.potholeweb.com) so city residents can report unfilled holes.

Other Hennigan crusades:

• Teaching financial literacy to high-school students.

• Holding NSTAR accountable for the recent spate of dog shockings.

• Preventing a Mercedes-Benz dealership from paving over a West Roxbury trailer park.

• Publicizing a city-owned animal shelter’s practice of dumping dog and animal carcasses in the trash (the director of the shelter, Stephen Crosby, eventually resigned).

She’s also been a long-term proponent of reforming the Boston Redevelopment Authority. And she worked patiently with West Roxbury parents to expand the Lyndon Pilot School despite opposition from both neighborhood residents and the Boston Public School administration.

Hennigan’s advocacy on these issues has won her the occasional plaudit. More often than not, however, it’s simply made her an easy target. But Hennigan’s practiced familiarity with crusades means she’s a master at something few of her younger colleagues know how to do: spotting an injustice and doing something about it. Hennigan was the only city councilor — the only one — to call for an investigation into the shockingly generous settlement paid to former Inspectional Services Department employee Julie Fothergill last year. (Fothergill was fired after she refused an order from ISD commissioner Kevin Joyce to concoct a phony contract bid.) The subsequent investigation by the city’s Finance Commission found that Joyce had cost the city an additional $160,000 in legal fees and lost wages on top of the $240,000 settlement. (See "Reform Agenda," Editorial, April 9.)

Three cheers for Maura Hennigan. Her colleagues on the council could learn a thing or two from her.

OUR GOVERNOR is starting to sound like an underworked patronage hack. At last week’s Governor’s Council meeting, Mitt Romney gave an update on preparations for issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples next month. "We’re doing the best we can, and I have to tell you, it’s not easy," he said, according to the State House News Service.

One of the difficulties his administration is facing? The language on the licenses has to be changed. The current forms have one line for "Husband" and one for "Wife." The new forms will read "Party A" and "Party B." Maybe we’re missing something, but that doesn’t sound difficult. A little sterile, perhaps — which is probably intended — but not difficult.

Romney also told the governor’s councilors that city and town clerks will be asking nonresident same-sex couples who wish to wed here if they are eligible to be married under their home state’s laws. "It’s going to be a lot of work for clerks," Romney predicted. Is he serious? If that’s a lot of work, we’re in the wrong business.

This weekend, Romney told the New York Times: "Massachusetts should not become the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage. We do not intend to export our marriage confusion to the entire nation." The Las Vegas of same-sex marriage? What, exactly, is he talking about? Fifty-five-hour-long marriages à la Britney Spears and Jason Alexander, who tied the knot in Vegas? Or nuptials like those of Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman, who also married in the city of sin? (Rodman tried to have their marriage annulled on the ground that he’d been drunk during the ceremony.)

Romney has been doing what he can to ensure that no out-of-state same-sex couples get married in the Commonwealth. He is enthusiastically enforcing an odious law providing that the state cannot marry a nonresident couple if their marriage would not be legal in their home state. The law was passed in 1913 to prevent interracial couples from states in which such marriages were banned from marrying in the Commonwealth. Romney has said that since no other state sanctions gay marriages, no lesbian and gay couples from out of state should be able to marry in Massachusetts. Last month, New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer said that if a gay couple from New York were to wed in Massachusetts, that marriage would be legal in New York. Does Romney now purport to understand the laws of New York better than that state’s attorney general? Romney spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman did not return a phone call seeking comment.

And while Romney is busy making sure that city and town clerks check up on out-of-state gay couples, will he do the same for out-of-state heterosexual couples? Rhode Island bans first cousins from marrying. Nebraska does not allow anyone younger than 19 to marry. Will town clerks be given a list of the 49 other states’ marriage laws and now be required to enforce what was previously ignored?

The closer we get to May 17, the more Romney acts and sounds as if he’s come unhinged. What’s he going to do when all those gay couples get married and ... nothing happens? No chaos. No confusion. No Elvis-themed wedding chapels installed on Newbury Street. Maybe he’ll fill his time enforcing all the Commonwealth’s other laws that typically escape notice, such as those prohibiting spitting and blasphemy.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com